Growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, my best friend and I lived only a quarter mile apart as the crow flies. We had nearly identical houses, both clad in a blend of brick and vinyl that allowed our newly minted middle-class parents to signal status without breaking the bank. Getting to each other’s homes should have been simple.
The trouble was, we lived on opposite ends of two cul-de-sac neighborhoods, each fronting a busy corridor that had once been a farm road. A strictly legal trip from his house to mine involved a 25-minute, mile-long trek along aimless streets, largely without a sidewalk. So we cheated, cutting through backyards to the howls of homeowners. This was the early 2000s; privacy fences have since been installed that probably would have ended our friendship.
Ours was a problem that city planning was supposed to prevent: Cities were meant to grow along a coordinated pattern of easily navigable streets and public spaces. Until the 20th century, they did. The street grid—an innovation as useful today as in antiquity—reigned. But about a century ago, when the modern era of American city planning began, the grid fell out of favor. Arterial roads and winding cul-de-sacs, far friendlier to cars than to pedestrians, were ascendant.
In one sense, my friend and I lived in the most planned environment in history. Every building around us was subject to a set of rigid regulations. If our neighbor turned her garage into an apartment or adjusted the pitch of her roof, zoning enforcers would be out in 24 hours. But when it came to the public realm—the space between buildings that ties a city together—there was no plan, except to move cars through a landscape of lawns.
[M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning]
We were the victims of an American approach to city planning that had lost its way. But the next generation of kids may not be so unlucky. After a long demise, the grid is showing signs of a comeback.
Humans have been doing something like city planning for millennia, though it hasn’t always been called that.
In the West, our city-planning tradition traces its roots to Hippodamus of Miletus, who laid out the ancient-Greek port of Piraeus in a rectangular grid expanding outward from an agora. The Romans replicated this model in colonies across the Mediterranean, adding sewers and stormwater infrastructure. They so loved their sewers, in fact, that they designated a goddess to preside over them.
The grid carried over to the New World. The Spanish empire instructed colonists to plan cities around a town square with a church and a royal council, violently imposed on top of existing Mesoamerican cities. From these twin centers of Spanish power, grids shot outward.
The American colonial period marked a renaissance in city planning, as settlers inspired by Enlightenment ideas platted hundreds of street grids on dispossessed land, each testing new designs. In 1682, the surveyor Thomas Holme laid out a rectangular grid connecting the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, with four parks of equal size orbiting a central plaza—the basis for Philadelphia. In 1811, surveyors divided a largely uninhabited Manhattan into 155 streets and a dozen grand avenues, laying the groundwork for New York City.
On occasion, American city planners even infused grids with spiritual significance. Joseph Smith’s “plat of Zion”—a grid design that eventually served as the basis for Salt Lake City—was said to be divinely inspired.
Divinity aside, there was good reason to love grids. As Alain Bertaud—a former city planner for the World Bank—points out, planning a grid in advance of growth allows surveyors to demarcate the public and private realms, reserving space for necessary infrastructure and ensuring that future expansion follows a coherent pattern. That might sound restrictive, but the result is a blank canvas that empowers cities to grow and adapt.
In the 19th century, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted spiced up America’s grids with citywide parks systems in places such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Buffalo, New York. A young City Beautiful movement carved grand boulevards and civic plazas out of capitals such as Denver and Washington, D.C. Transit companies blanketed metropolises such as Los Angeles and Chicago with networks of streetcars and commuter trains. Without ever using the phrase city planning, Americans had, by the dawn of the 20th century, perfected a formula for planning cities.
And then we invented city planning.
Beginning in the 1910s, the first local city-planning departments were established, not so much to plot out the physical growth of cities but to implement a novel policy: zoning. Zoning shifted the focus of city planning from stewarding the public realm to managing private development. The forebears of professional planners were unconcerned with land uses and densities, allowing mixed-use neighborhoods to emerge. But zoning remade cities into a fragmented landscape of malls, office parks, and residential subdivisions.
[From the July/August 2023 issue: How parking ruined everything]
Developers lost the power to decide what to build on any given lot. But they gained unprecedented powers to shape the public realm; as long as the streets were sufficiently wide and the corners sufficiently rounded, they could plot out new streets untethered from any broader plan. With federal backing, new neighborhoods became a collection of winding streets and cul-de-sacs, connected to the broader city by only one entrance. That these neighborhoods discouraged walking was seen by contemporary planners as a feature, not a bug.
This novel approach to planning was premised on a particular vision of the ideal city that still holds sway today. Taken on its own terms, the appeal is easy to see: The archetypal American would live on a quiet street in a single-family house surrounded by a lawn. He would work in a central business district or perhaps a new industrial park on the edge of town, and spend his earnings in a dedicated shopping district. Traveling from home to work to errands would be fast, solitary, and—most important—in a car.
One hundred years later, this grand experiment has resulted in cities that are unaffordable, stagnant, segregated, and sprawling. Walk into any planning office today, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find the street and park plans of yore. Instead, you will find reams of zoning rules listing permitted and prohibited uses, maximum building heights, minimum yard depths, required lot dimensions, limits on unit numbers, and required parking.
Unlike their predecessors who spent their time sketching grids, modern American city planners now dedicate themselves to either enforcing the fading dream of zoning or working around it. Indeed, the principal function of the planning office in most major cities is to help developers navigate incoherent rules adopted decades ago, in pursuit of an urban-design vision that few still believe in—reviewing stacks of paperwork and organizing endless hearings just to get something built.
I know, because it used to be my job. After a childhood of navigating the sprawl, I decided to go to planning school and do something about it. I knew that working as a planner in New York wasn’t going to be a game of SimCity. But after a few years of managing rezoning applications—generating mountains of paperwork, mostly to legalize existing buildings and businesses—I wasn’t sure whether I had done even a day of planning. Like so many idealistic young city planners before me, I walked away.
Nearly a decade ago, the Cornell historian Thomas J. Campanella described the malaise haunting American city planning. A century after it had become a profession, what did we have to show for ourselves? Streets careen toward dead ends, home prices keep spiraling, public spaces metastasize into monster regional parks, and schools sequester themselves on prisonlike campuses—all inaccessible to anyone without a car.
The quest to govern cities as idealized suburbs has had another unintended consequence: Nearly all U.S. housing growth has been driven to the unplanned periphery, where Americans are especially vulnerable to worsening environmental risks. In California, restrictive rules in big blue cities have forced hundreds of thousands of families into the path of wildfires. In red states such as Florida and Texas, development in floodplains—nudged along by generous federal subsidies—continues largely unabated.
The ironic result: Many American cities are both overplanned and under-planned.
The breakdown of the American street grid was quantified in a 2020 study by Geoff Boeing, a University of Southern California planning professor. Boeing used geospatial methods to show how robust street grids—compact, dense, interconnected—devolved into a mess of cul-de-sacs over the course of the 20th century, a transformation that hooked Americans on cars and increased greenhouse-gas emissions.
[Read: Cities aren’t built for kids]
But he also found reason for hope: From a nadir in the 1990s, grids seem to be making a slow recovery. Thanks in part to advocacy by groups such as the new urbanists, a rising generation of planners is ushering in a partial return to traditional neighborhood design and commonsense city planning.
Across Texas, this alternative vision has started to take root. In 2018, the rapidly growing Austin suburb of Bastrop adopted a city plan that dispensed with rigid zoning and established a street grid that will accommodate future development, carefully directing it away from flood-prone areas. One year earlier, and more than 200 miles south, Laredo adopted a similar plan, calling for growth to follow a pattern of grids and plazas.
Let’s hope they stick to their plans. If we revive the street grid and start to undo decades of arbitrary zoning rules, American city planning might finally get back on track. If nothing else, the next generation of suburban teens might find a new friend.
