Taming the Crabgrass Frontier: Regional Planning and the Metropolitan Idea in Chicago, 1890-193

For much of the twentieth century, American metropolitan regions were characterized by decentralization: shrinking cities and growing suburbs, the latter caricatured as dull, homogenous, and politically conservative. But to an influential set of urban planners and reformers around 1900, decentralization represented a radical opportunity for imaginative alternatives to what they saw as the socially divided, inequitable modern city. This dissertation traces their aspirations through the Chicago-based regional planning movement, a campaign for decentralization and metropolitan policymaking, from the Progressive Era through the New Deal. Their work, it argues, reveals the deliberate effort to define the metropolitan region in the early twentieth century. What planners and reformers first embraced as a planning unit signifying social unity and shared interests across city and suburb, however, transformed by 1935 into a fragmented set of municipalities attempting to insulate themselves from perceived urban threats.;This dissertation responds to recent calls by urban historians for a "new metropolitan history" that examines city and suburb together to gain insights into urban development. It also seeks to historicize this metropolitan perspective, which was itself a political and cultural creation. It emerged powerfully in turn-of-the-century Chicago. Beginning with the campaign for the Cook County Forest Preserves, planned in 1904, Chicago regional thinking fused social-progressive concern for public space with an aesthetic movement that embraced the Midwestern landscape. The movement soon expanded to encompass suburban workers' housing, stronger powers for county government, and suburban anti-vice reform. But as a rising real estate industry promoted regional planning to bolster suburban development in the 1920s, the movement's aims shifted. Chicago-based regional planners wrote the New Deal policies that spurred post-World War II suburbanization, fusing real estate economics and racial exclusion with socially progressive regional thinking. The ironic result of their work was a sharp departure from the movement's initial aims, exacerbating the inequality and provincialism that the movement was founded to counteract.