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City planning was an ancient art form, but its evolution has reflected the social, economic and environmental changes of the time. After floundering a bit during the mid-1900s, it is now a valued profession again.

Spurred on by the momentum created by the City Beautiful movement, the profession entered the 20^th century on the right track, but after WWII the entire country fell in love with the automobile and the mobility it offered. And in the rush to provide new housing opportunities 鈥� with the expectation that anything new would be better than the old 鈥� even planners got swept up in the growth mania of the mid-century. The result was 鈥渟uburban sprawl鈥� and 鈥渦rban renewal.鈥� Since then, we鈥檝e learned some valuable lessons about what works and what doesn鈥檛.

The attempts to transform the face of poor, rundown urban areas were quickly exposed as misguided, thanks to the work of and others.

Community activists, historic preservationists and many urban planners leaped into the fight to slow urban renewal projects and eventually channeled that movement into a much more productive effort to renew downtowns. But the ill-conceived and enormously costly rush outward to far-flung suburban areas proved much more difficult to change.

By the early 1970s many in the planning community were disillusioned with the rush to the suburbs. Efforts to change how suburban areas developed became prominent, led by such innovators as . His work changed the way many planners looked at regions and cities, especially his book , which was a revelation to many of us entering the profession at that time.

But the big shift in thinking in the planning profession actually came from our old professional companions, the architects. The neo-traditional Town Planning and movements were led by a couple of dynamic urban designers, and . What they had to say in the early 1990s about the last half century of city planning shook the profession to its core and is still causing waves today. I鈥檒l share more about them next time.