91视频

Cities are great, but why is planning for them so important? A brief look at history tells us why.

Cities (well, villages initially) emerged 7,000 to 10,000 years ago in Mesopotamia and elsewhere from the need to trade products and for people to be able to interact frequently as a result of the emergence of agriculture (as opposed to hunting and gathering). That same imperative for commerce and communication is why cities have become the driving force behind most human progress to date; it will continue to drive the evolution of civilization worldwide well into the future. Creating that capacity for interaction is where the innovative solutions to the problems we confront today will come from.

But why can鈥檛 that just happen on its own? Good question; there are clearly many examples of great urban places that were not 鈥減lanned.鈥� However, even before there was a planning profession, in the last several hundred years humans have increasingly recognized the difficulty of forming healthy, efficient, prosperous and, yes, beautiful urban places without a great deal of forethought.

This awareness, and the efforts that sprang from it, produced many of the around the world that we admire so much. In this country, the planning profession was essentially born in Chicago as part of the , most fully expressed at the . By the late 1800s, leaders in many growing urban areas realized something needed to change. Their cities were places of wealth and energy 鈥� but also grossly inefficient and unhealthy places to live and work, to say nothing of recreate. While the fair provided an interesting glimpse of what a city of the future could become, it only lasted a few months. But it did plant the seed for those who wanted to create a better future for their urban places.