An International Perspective on Planning in 1909

The same year Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett presented the Plan of Chicago to the City's Commercial Club, the British Parliament passed the first piece of legislation dealing with town planning. This shared centenary provides an opportunity to look at some of the different ways that urban planning has developed in the two nations and to see what lessons can be learned for the future of planning in a time of economic, social and environmental turbulence.
 
British planner Kelvin MacDonald — Senior Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University and specialist adviser on planning to the UK Parliament — shows that the different influences on planning led to very different outcomes with each country looking — sometimes with jealousy, sometimes with dismay — at the efforts on either side of the Atlantic and with the Chicago Plan, in particular, being quoted by those in the UK who wanted a different sort of planning.