'A more beautiful future': Class, race and city planning in Glasgow and Chicago, 1890--1968

This dissertation examines and compares the ideology and practice of town and city planning in the cities of Glasgow, Scotland and Chicago, Illinois from 1890 through the 1960s. By the early 1970s, the scale of urban reconstruction was so total that only fragments of the nineteenth-century built environment remained in most British and American cities. Most scholars regard urban reconstruction as a failure because after decades of redevelopment cities exhibited pronounced social divisions. Using a wide range of primary sources acquired from archives in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison, Wisconsin, this dissertation will address the following questions. Why did British and American planners and policy makers embrace comprehensive redevelopment as a panacea for a wide range of social, physical, and economic problems in the twentieth century? How did the different political, administrative, social and cultural contexts of Britain and the United States condition urban planning in each country? Finally, how were class and race "planned" in Glasgow and Chicago? This dissertation finds that the British and American planning movements operated from a broadly shared ideological template that saw the transformation of the physical environment as the essential means through which to achieve social, economic and civic improvement. Planning ideology allowed for transformational expressions and activity in the service of an inherently conservative purpose. At the end of decades of determined effort, urban reconstruction, conducted with reference to the ideology of professional planning, perpetuated the basic social hierarchy of class and race in Glasgow and Chicago.