Lewis Mumford, review of Our Cities, American Journal of Sociology 44 (July 1938): 149.

Louis Wirth quoted in Howard Odum, American Sociology: The Story of Sociology in the United States through 1950 (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1951), 231.

‘Movies: The City: Fine New Documentary Film Shows Evolution of U.S. Urban Living’, LIFE 6 (June 5, 1939): 64–5.

http://www.archive.org/details/CityTheP1939 and http://www.archive.org/details/CityTheP1939_2.

Harold Buttenheim, ‘Does the Planner's Field Have a Boundary’, The Planners’ Journal 6 (1940): 17.

Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963); Kermit C. Parsons, ‘Collaborative Genius, The Regional Planning Association of America’, Journal of the American Planning Association 60 (Fall 1994): 462–82.

Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934).

Daniel Schaffer, Garden Cities for America: The Radburn Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982); Paul Conkin, Tomorrow a New World; The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959); Joseph Arnold, The New Deal in the Suburbs: A History of the Greenbelt Towns Program, 1935–1954 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971); Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Cathy Knepper, Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); K.C. Parsons, ‘Clarence Stein and the Greenbelt Towns: Settling for Less’, Journal of the American Institute of Planners 46 (Spring 1990): 161–83.

Insightful and detailed studies of The City that draw directly on archives and interviews with the film-makers are Howard Gillette, Jr., ‘Film as Artifact: The City (1939)’, American Studies 18 (Fall 1977): 71–85, and William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). The film also receives useful commentary in Robert Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), but it gets little mention in other studies of Mumford's life and thought by Casey Blake, Donald Miller, and Mark Luccarelli.

Critics in 1939 noted that the ending sequence appeared ‘flat and lifeless’ in comparison with the energy of the earlier sections. ‘A World's Fair Film’, review of The City, Architectural Review 86 (August 1939): 93–4, quoted in Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford, 143. Also see Howard Gillette's characterization of the film as a ‘propaganda piece for the garden city idea’ in ‘Film as Artifact’, 73. A commonly distributed version of the film cut the ending substantially.

Patrick D. Reagan, Designing a New America: The Origins of New Deal Planning, 1890–1943 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999) has detailed intellectual biographies of Delano and Merriam, as well as of Wesley Clair Mitchell, Beardsley Ruml, and Henry S. Dennison. Delano's role in Washington, DC planning is discussed in Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 124–9.

Barry D. Karl, Charles Merriam and the Study of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974); Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 274; Reagan, Designing a New America. The formidable volumes on Recent Social Trends emerged from Hoover's Committee on Recent Economic Changes, led by Columbia University economist Wesley C. Mitchell, which reported in February 1929. In September of that year, Hoover convened a Committee on Recent Social Change consisting of Mitchell, Merriam, William F. Ogburn, Howard Odum, Alice Hamilton, and Shelby Harrison, all people who knew each other through the National Research Council and the recent privately organized Joint Committee on Bases of Sound Land Policy. Ogburn, another University of Chicago sociologist, became director of research and mobilized two dozen experts ‘to examine and to report upon recent social trends in the United States with a view to providing such a review as might supply the basis for the formulation of large national policies looking to the next phase of the nation's development’. President's Research Committee on Social Trends, Recent Social Trends in the United States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1933), xi.

National Resources Committee, Regional Factors in National Planning and Development (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1935).

The anticipation and limitations of national planning are the main lens through which the organization is viewed in key historical studies by Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Random House, 1995), and Otis L. Graham, Jr., Toward a Planned Society: From Roosevelt to Nixon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Also see Harold Ickes, ‘City Planning Merges into National Planning’, The American City (Nov. 1933): 65, cited in Alan Brinkley, ‘The National Resources Planning Board and the Reconstruction of Planning’, in The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy, ed. Robert Fishman (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000), 173–92. Andrew M. Shanken, 194X: Architecture, Planning, and Consumer Culture on the American Home Front (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 19, argues that ‘Merriam, Mitchell, and Delano sought to bring city planning together with “sociological planning” and regional and national planning.’ However, the Final Report of the National Resources Board (1934) offered only cursory mention of cities, as Jennifer Light points out in The Nature of Cities: Ecological Visions and the American Urban Professions, 1920–1960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 48.

Light, Nature of Cities, 48.

Urban Government: Volume I of the Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Committee to the National Resources Committee Urban Planning (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1939) and Land Policies: Volume II of the Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Committee to the National Resources Committee (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1939).

Louis Wirth, ‘The Urban Society and Civilization’, American Journal of Sociology 45 (March 1940): 749; Roger A. Salerno, Louis Wirth: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987), 34, 41; Hans H. Gerth, ‘The Development of Social Thought in the United States and Germany: Critical Observations on the Occasion of the Publication of C. Wright Mills’ White Collar’, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 7 (Spring 1994): 525–68; Gerth's 1994 essay was a previously unpublished manuscript dating from 1951.

Charles W. Eliot, II, ‘New Approaches to City Planning’, Planning for the Future of American Cities (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1935), 111, and Ladislas Segoe, ‘City Planning and the Urbanism Study’, Planning for City, State, Region, and Nation: Proceedings of the Joint Conference on Planning (Chicago: American Society of Planning Officials, 1936), 7, 12, both quoted in Scott, American City Planning since 1890, 310–1.

For example, see the review by Richard Ratcliff, Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 14 (May 1938): 231, which described it as ‘a comprehensive summary of the static and dynamic aspects of urban society in this country’.

In this reading, Our Cities lies squarely within the tradition of progressive reform that seeks government interventions to fix failures of open markets without challenging the basic distribution of economic power. For an alternative reading that sees the report as a call for radical restructuring, see John D. Fairfield, The Mysteries of the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design, 1877–1937 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993).

Both documents thus dealt with the same fundamental issue as the Regional Plan of New York and Environs (1931), which was about the spatial arrangement of urban activities and population. Even though Lewis Mumford strongly disliked the New York plan for accepting the power of centralization, this was an argument among people who shared some of the same assumptions about the essential challenge for urban planning and policy. See Mark Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 167–80. Thirty years earlier, the Pittsburgh Survey had also struggled with framing its analysis in metropolitan terms. Edward K. Muller, ‘The Pittsburgh Survey and ‘Greater Pittsburgh’: A Muddled Metropolitan Geography’, in Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century, ed. Maurine W. Greenwald and Margo Anderson (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 68–87.

Speaking to a national city planning meeting in 1917, Merriam referred to the ‘tendency of our city to organize its own growth – to plan its own development. Not theory alone but grim necessity drives the city builders of our day to that painstaking study of facts and forces, that careful coordination and systematization of diverse factors we call planning. The sanitary survey and plan, the financial survey and plan, the governmental survey and plan, the social survey and plan, and the physical survey and plan, loom large in the present day municipality’. In effect, this is a comprehensive claim for city planning as a social science. Charles Merriam, ‘City Planning in Chicago’, manuscript of address to City Planning Conference, Kansas City, May 9, 1917, quoted in Reagan, Designing a New America, 64.

W.E.B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1899); Hull-House Maps and Papers, a Presentation of Nationalities and Wages in a Congested District of Chicago, together with Comments and Essays on Problems Growing Out of the Social Conditions (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1895). The Pittsburgh Survey also used visual evidence in the form of Lewis Hine's photographs and Joseph Stella's portraits of working-class Pittsburghers.

William Anderson, review of Our Cities, American Political Science Review, 32 (April 1938): 355–6.

Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer's Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).

Samuel Lubell, The Future of American Politics (New York: Harper, 1952); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945); Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Bros., 1944).

Arnold, New Deal in the Suburbs.

Our Cities, ix, 9, 56.

Our Cities, 9–10; Robert Park, ‘The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment’, in The City, ed. Robert Park and W.W. Burgess (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925), 40. Awareness of racial difference, unfortunately, did not translate directly into equitable action. In the decade after World War II, Wirth and other University of Chicago colleagues played important roles in the development of Chicago's urban renewal and public housing programmes, in which the initial goal of careful conservation of the urban fabric evolved into large-scale clearance and displacement. See Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Light, Nature of Cities.

Harlan Paul Douglas, The Suburban Trend (New York: Century, 1925), 327. The City bears comparison to the 1930 film Die Stadt Von Morgen, made by Maximilian von Goldbeck of Nurnberg and Erich Kotzer of Berlin. This silent film that used drawings as well as photography to depict the sequence by which a landscape of small cities and countryside turned into the overcrowded industrial metropolis and then how to separate industry from residential districts and reintroduce the natural environment into urban areas through coordinated regional thinking. The film-makers saw their work as a spur to rethinking urban planning and practice, again similarly to The City. In his periodical Städtebau, the well-known urbanist and architect Werner Hegemann praised the film as something that he had been hoping to see for many years, and he showed it during his speaking and consulting tour of Argentina in 1931, reading Spanish translations of the subtitles. I am indebted to Christiane Collins for calling the film to my attention. See Christiane Crasemann Collins, ‘Urban Interchange in the Southern Cone: Le Corbursier (1929) and Werner Hegemann (1931) in Argentina’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 4 (June 1995): 208–27, and Maximilian v. Goldbeck und Erick Kotzer, ‘Die Stadt Von Morgen: Ein Film Vom Städtebau’, Städtebau 25 (1930): 257–9.

Our Cities, 84.

Richard Griffith, ‘Films at the Fair’, Films (November 1939): 63–4, quoted in Alexander, Film on the Left, 255.

Urban Government: Volume I of the Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Committee to the National Resources Committee Urban Planning (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1939) and Land Policies: Volume II of the Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Committee to the National Resources Committee (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1939).

Robert A. Walker, The Planning Function in Urban Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941).

John M. Gaus, The Education of Planners, with Special Reference to the Graduate School of Design of Harvard University (Cambridge, MA: Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, 1943).

Gaus, Education of Planners, 24.

Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: Norton, 1984); Carl Abbott, Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in the Twentieth Century City (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983).

Charles W. Johnson and Charles O. Jackson, City behind a Fence; Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942–1946 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981); Jon Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos: The Growth of an Atomic Community (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Carl Abbott, ‘Building the Atomic Cities: Richland, Los Alamos, and the American Planning Language’, in The Atomic West, ed. Bruce Hevly and John Findlay (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), 90–118.

James Ford, review of Our Cities, The Planners’ Journal, 4 (1938): 23–4.

Action for Cities: A Guide for Community Planning (Chicago: Public Administration Service, 1943); Phillip J. Funigiello, ‘City Planning in World War II: The Experience of the National Resources Planning Board’, Social Science Quarterly 53 (June 1972): 91–104, and The Challenge to Urban Liberalism: Federal-City Relations during World War II (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1978), 173–6; U.S. National Resources Planning Board, National Resources Development Report for 1943, Part 2, Wartime Planning for War and Post-War (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1943).

Mark Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 96–8, and Jon Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 323, both note the limited impact.

It is interesting that Gus Newport, mayor of Berkeley, California, in the 1970s and later executive director of the Dudley Street Initiative, credits Our Cities with inspiring a sense of public service. ‘When I was mayor of Berkeley, California’, he writes, ‘I spent time with a group of older thinkers who played major roles in the development of public policy during the 1930s. …  One member shared a report with me called “Our Cities” … . One passage from this extraordinary document moved me … . “The manner of life of our people, the problems they face, and the hopes and desires they cherish for improvement in their existence and the advance of their civilization should be the supreme concern of government”. The essence of these words moved me on a spiritual, ethical, and intellectual basis’. Gus Newport, ‘Why Are We Replacing Furniture When Half the Neighborhood Is Missing’, The Nonprofit Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Fall 2003), www.adelphi.edu/linonprofit/pdfs/WhenHalttheNeighborhoodisMissing.pdf (accessed October 25, 2011).

Emily Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2005). In her terminology, high intensity denotes both incremental and comprehensive efforts to remake and improve existing urban areas; low intensity denotes the planning of new communities and region-wide planning.