An American Urban Residential Landscape, 1890–1920: Chicago in th ...

among increasingly diverse town populations. Nonpartisanship, together with local government efficiency and accountability, were considered necessary for implementing improved village landscapes, as was the shared participation of men and women. Many of the conspicuous contradictions and tensions of urban improvement were apparent as the idea evolved in rural towns after the Civil War. For example, an emerging gulf between reform leaders and grassroots improvers working through VISs began widening as the ideology arose in cities during the 1890s. Moreover, the nascent pecuniary component of village improvement eventually predominated in the commercial world of Chicago, challenging and ultimately overriding the progressive concern for social mutuality and civic participation.

The first scholar to identify an ideological component to improvement was Christopher Tunnard. As Director of Planning Studies at Yale in the early 1950s, Tunnard attempted to reinvigorate the principle of beauty in city planning after decades of domination in the field by functionalist professionals. When municipal authorities multiplied, Tunnard wrote in The City of Man, “urbanism began to embrace the idea of ‘improvement,’” and “civic designers” supervised development addressing the “social basis of urban aesthetics.”¹⁰ Omitting any explicit references to the broader meaning of improvement, Tunnard nonetheless implied the existence of its ideological dimensions by enclosing the term within quotation marks, a practice occasionally repeated by subsequent histories, most notably in discussions of the physical development of urban centers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Discussing the rise of company towns during the late nineteenth century, urban planning scholar Margaret Crawford found the paternalism of employers was characterized by efforts to impart an ethic of improvement among workers and their families through schemes that stressed self-reliance and promoted entrepreneurial virtues of thrift and hard work. The benefits employers offered workers were impressive: “hospitals, libraries, profit-sharing, [and] numerous ‘improving organizations,’” though what attracted most attention was the physical appearance of company towns. The apotheosis of “the ‘improved’ town,” suggested