Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design Since 1880, 4th Edition

The City of Monuments

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once rewarded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.

Daniel Burnham, The Plan of Chicago (1909)

Why always the biggest? I do this to restore to each individual German his self-respect.

Adolf Hitler, speech to construction workers (1939)(quoted by Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 1970)

6The City of Monuments: The City Beautiful Movement: Chicago, New Delhi, Berlin, Moscow, 1900–1945

The City Beautiful movement had its nineteenth-century origins on the boulevards and promenades of the great European capitals: Haussmann’s reconstruction of Paris under Napoleon III and the almost simultaneous construction of the Vienna Ringstrasse were its classic models. Yet its twentieth-century manifestations came mainly in other places and cultures: in the great commercial cities of middle and western America, where civic leaders built to overcome collective inferiority complexes and boost business; and in the newly designated capitals of far-flung pieces of Empire, where British civil servants commissioned plans that would express imperial dominance and racial ...