Excerpt: From the Introduction

In the seventy years after its founding, Chicago grew--without forethought--from five thousand residents to a teeming metropolis of almost two million. When Daniel Burnham wrote the Plan of Chicago in 1909, a city plan was the exception, not the rule, in the United States. He opened his plan with a justification of the benefits of growth with forethought, not only for a city, but for a whole region. Chicago businessmen commissioned Burnham, one of the few men in the United States who were trailblazing the new profession of "city planner," to write Chicago's plan. Burnham, an architect by training, was proficient in visualizing present and future physical configurations of the region. But his plan was deficient in the human element. It failed to propose institutional or governmental systems to improve quality of life for the people of the region. Chicago residents in 1909 suffered from corruption in government, inequitable taxation, overcrowded schools, unsanitary public hospitals, and a host of other social ills that the plan avoided.

Burnham's Plan of Chicago came to define planning for the next hundred years as the rearrangement of the region's physical assets, but not the improvement of the residents' quality of life. One might speculate that there were no local examples of city-building from a more humanistic point of view at the time Burnham wrote the Plan of Chicago. But that would be wrong. Chicago had a highly developed series of networks of women who worked to build the city for its inhabitants, to clean it for those who suffered from poor sanitation, to reform the school system, and to create institutions like the Cook County Juvenile Court, the first juvenile court in the nation. At the pinnacle of those overlapping networks was Jane Addams, co-founder of Hull-House.

Jane Addams and Daniel Burnham were contemporaries. Both were city-builders although their approaches were very different. Addams was the Chicago and national leader of the settlement house movement. Burnham was the Chicago and national leader of the City Beautiful movement. The historic record seems to indicate that their paths crossed only infrequently, but their circles of friends and acquaintances overlapped with regularity. When the idea of writing this book to contrast the Addams and Burnham approaches to city-building occurred to me, it was hard to imagine that it hadn't already been conceived and written--the connections between their worlds seemed so obvious.

Perhaps it was the difference between her "think local" and his "think monumental" approaches that kept Addams and Burnham from collaborating. As I wrote the book, I couldn't help but note the number of times the women in it--and there are many besides Jane Addams--made great changes with small resources, whether it was the first playground in Chicago (at Hull-House) or a dramatic reduction in infant mortality by bringing medical care out of impersonal and forbidding institutions and directly into immigrant communities. There are many such modest innovations with powerful results described in the pages of this book.

A good number of Chicagoans have heard of Jane Addams, but the specifics and importance of her contributions may have faded from memory. Most of the physical manifestations of her work--the Hull-House playground, the city's first bathhouse, the Hull-House complex itself--have been demolished (the two surviving buildings on the University of Illinois campus were once surrounded by eleven other buildings offering day care, a theater, meeting space, classrooms, a library, a coffee house, two museums, and other cultural amenities).

Daniel Burnham's Plan of Chicago had at least one asset Jane Addams's innovations never had--a promotional machine that began one hundred years ago and continues to this day. Although the 1909 Plan was unauthorized, unofficial, and written only to represent the views of businessmen, all official plans developed subsequent to Burnham's mirror its focus and content. Wealthy businessmen not only controlled the crafting of the Plan of Chicago--they also controlled the early implementation of it. They were clear that the Plan was one to serve business interests and equally clear that they expected the taxpayers to pick up the tab.

In contrast, the settlement women were engaged in a different, more humanistic type of city-building. They created institutions to serve the public good and instigated reforms in public institutions through state and city legislative bodies, in spite of having no standing as voters. They often found, after securing a new law, that they had to pay for its implementation or volunteer to implement it themselves in the absence of state or municipal funding. Public funding usually followed their proof of the value of each innovation, but that was often a mixed blessing. Reforms of schools, public health facilities, courts, and other critical public institutions of the day were all threatened by patronage hiring and corruption.

The boundaries defining the limits of a city plan were flexible in this age. Some, including the businessmen of the Burnham era, would have denied that schools, public health, and other "software" of city-building or region-building were appropriate to a plan. The original promoters of a plan within the business community were primarily concerned with the consequences of rail traffic inefficiencies on their business prospects. Others, including Burnham himself, would have included urban institutions serving social needs, if given a free hand in developing Chicago's first plan. Sociology, the new discipline to study the behavior and needs of humans in group settings, developed on a track parallel to the discipline of city planning. At the early stages of development, sociology and urban planning were closely intertwined, as in the early efforts of New York settlement leaders to address "congestion" of housing through better urban planning in order to overcome a host of societal ills. City planning and sociology were closely linked in the first National Conference on Planning, which took place in Washington, D.C., in 1909, the same year the Plan of Chicago was released.

The business community of today, a more sophisticated breed than their predecessors of one hundred years ago, understands that the Chicago region's success does not rest solely on physical infrastructure. In fact, the Metropolis 2020 Plan, initiated by the Commercial Club and intended as an update to the Burnham plan, begins with a chapter on education, and takes on a host of controversial topics such as governance, inequitable taxation, racial segregation, and health care for poor children. This broadening of perspective is highly commendable, but now the challenge is to translate humanistic concerns the region's official plan. The approaches, techniques, and accumulated wisdom the city-building women offered one hundred years ago were stamped out of any official processes long ago, to the disadvantage of all the region's residents. If we are to begin anew to build a regional planning process that incorporates their accumulated wisdom and addresses the human infrastructure needed for our region's continued success, we must honor more than the Plan of Chicago.

The region's official planning processes, up through the most recent plans, took the same approach as the Plan of Chicago, arranging and rearranging physical space and connectors like streets and rails. It is much easier to preserve open space, for example, than to attack poverty or injustice, although even preserving open space hasn't always been easy. Our challenge today, if we give planning for people our full attention, is to search out, assess, and promote the best models for a human-centered approach to regional planning. The seeds for the human-centered model were planted over one hundred years ago. We didn't nurture those seeds. In many cases we plowed them under, so that they are not available today without a good deal of digging.

The people who set urban and regional policy in northeastern Illinois have been and still are engineers and physical planners. The narrow lens established by Burnham has become narrower, not broader over time. The great majority of current planners with official decision-making authority bring expertise exclusively from the Illinois Department of Transportation, a limited perspective. Even with the best of intentions, they won't be able to absorb the amount of new material they need to master in order to plan for people.

This book came about because of the confluence of two events in September 2007 that fiercely affected me. The first was the decision of the Illinois State Toll Highway Authority to honor Jane Addams by renaming the Northwest Tollway after her. That struck me as an odd honor for a woman who lived locally and didn't drive! Three days later, at a "visioning" session with regional planners, three speakers repeated Burnham's quote "With things as they should be, every business man in Chicago would make more money than he does now." The first, historian Geoffrey Baer, used the quote in its proper historical context. The next two used it in reference to the preparation of a 2040 regional plan, seeing no apparent difficulty with planning exclusively for the benefit of business. Ironically, the twenty-first century business community had moved to a broad vision of regional well-being, but the official process was still mired in the constraints of the 1909 plan.

My own history as a community advocate and organizer connected me to many of the issues the settlement house residents influenced, although my achievements are small compared to theirs. I fought for an active local park design, in contrast to a proposed Victorian garden. I supported affordable housing when my neighborhood was first threatened by gentrification. My children went to local public schools, although private school was easily an option. That day in September 2007, I knew, as a former board member of a modern-day settlement (Association House of Chicago), former leader of school reform under Mayor Harold Washington, and all-around advocate of social justice, that urban planning had to offer more than the vision of business success presented that day.

By the end of the month, I was compelled to respond and started to seriously research the women who I knew had made substantial contributions at the time. Where was Jane Addams's voice in the Plan of Chicago? What of the handful of other women's names that we still recognize today from that era? Where was the voice of Julia Lathrop, or Lucy Flower, or Ida B. Wells-Barnett? Who were the other obvious leaders and city-builders of the day who should have contributed to the Plan but had no voice in it? What might they have said? In what way would their scholarly sociological inquiries, reports, and published books and articles have informed and improved the Plan of Chicago?

Their books, reports, and articles began to almost "speak" to me as I read more and more of them. Soon I could imagine what some of their conversations might have been if they had been invited to contribute. I could imagine what they would have said about the chapters Burnham wrote. I could imagine what they would have said about the topics omitted from his plan. That is how the core of this book was conceived and how it is written. The eight central chapters are "speculative non-fiction"--heavily researched and documented opinions of the women (and the men who shared their purposes), threaded together by conversational strands that are plausible but not actual statements.

In the months I spent researching and writing about this topic, I was able to uncover a treasure trove of intersections and coincidences. Interesting parallels and contrasts between the work of city-building women and male-led institutions in Chicago at the turn of the century have been sitting unexamined for one hundred years, serving mainly as little anecdotes and vignettes in service to other theses.

The subject is nowhere near exhausted. I hope What Would Jane Say? will be read as an invitation to others to give the topic the scholarly attention it deserves. It is my fervent wish that scholars from the Chicago History Fair to the halls of academia will pick up the challenge to dig deeper, probe farther, and refine the connections that I have begun to mine here. I hope that planners will look at future regional plans and ask not whether they measure up only to the self-interested principles of the Plan of Chicago, but ask "What Would Jane Say?"