Policy: Historical Antecedents of Cultural Planning - Week 12

"The History of Village Improvement in the United States" - Warren H. Manning

• Village Improvement grew out of villages' use of commons
• many commons were divided and turned into private plots/buildings 
• village improvement was first concerned with trees along roadways; previously farmers and lumberers had stolen them
• connection to direct method of local government
• desire to bring beauty, convenience, and safety to public grounds
• attracted people of culture to purchase homes (457)
• major phase of movement was marked by parks planning, village improvement societies, and government park acquisitions, such as Yellowstone
• goals of village improvement
• town pride
• public spirit
• intellectual life
• good fellowship
• public health
• improvement of roads, roadsides, and sidewalks; addition of roadside benches
• street lights
• public parks
• improvement of home and home life
• tree planting
• improved railroad stations
• betterment of factory surroundings
• bringing together artists to create the Chicago World's Fair "gave a tremendous impetus to civic and village improvement activities" (460)
• 1897: organization of the American Park and Outdoor Art Association in Louisville
• Women's Clubs were very influential in the Village Improvement movement
• movement encompassed arts & crafts, libraries, recreation, railroads, schools, civic art, and more (461)
• article argues that VI societies should compel government to do their legitimate work well (like improving roads) and not do the work in the government's place, but that they should "inaugurate activities of which little is known in their communities" (464) such as the building of playgrounds and school gardens and the improvement of school and home grounds

"Municipal Art Movement" (Scott, 1971)

• early civic endeavors in city planning were focused more on aesthetics than analytic or scientific reasoning
• aesthetic endeavors were often based on ideals of society and a "concern for municipal efficiency and economy"
• ideal city came to be associated with the "white city" set up at the World's Fair
• municipal art societies worked towards goal of making streets and other public areas more visually pleasing
• attracted tourists and "desirable" residents due to increasing real estate prices
• inspiration of Paris, the ideal "City Beautiful"
• clean paved streets
• public buildings surrounded by harmonious architecture
• modern art statuary
• beautiful bridges
• old cathedral
• beautification was one aspect of increasing civic pride
• emphasis on aesthetics did contradict earlier humanitarian values of reformers, sociologists, social workers, etc.

City Beautiful: The 1901 Plan for Washington, D.C. (Rose, 1996)

• by 1910 about 46% of Americans lived in cities
• as the middle and upper-middle classes moved out to the suburbs, the working class was left with decaying urban centers
• reformers were generally of these middle and upper-middle classes who feared the potential violence of those left in the cities and worried about their safety and business viability
• belief concerning the moral value of cities: "Common to almost all the reformers...was the conviction--explicit or implicit--that the city, although obviously different from the village...should nevertheless replicate the moral order of the village. City dwellers, they believed, must somehow be brought to perceive themselves as members of cohesive communities knit together by shared moral and social values."
• Daniel Burnham: believed that City Beautiful, by reforming the landscape, would complement the other reforms of Progressives
• believed a beautiful city would inspire inhabitants to moral and civic virtues
• goals:
• social ills would be swept away, as the beauty of the city would inspire civic loyalty and moral rectitude in the impoverished
• American cities would be brought to cultural parity with their European competitors through the use of the European Beaux-Arts idiom
• a more inviting city center still would not bring the upper classes back to live, but certainly to work and spend money in the urban areas
• 1901 Washington, D.C. plan was first expression of City Beautiful movement
• inspired especially by Paris - "a work of civic art"
• "In the past, the Mall was simply an open space for residents of Washington D.C.; with the new plan it 'was reconceived as a new kind of governmental complex, a combined civic and cultural center that is at once a national front lawn and an imperial forum.'"
• plan didn't include measures for displaced poor
• layout of buildings created a sacred yet exclusive government space which seemed to seal out local residents and commercial districts
• did not succeed in influencing the moral and economic form or poor residents:
• "The idea that the poor would be somehow morally rejuvenated, and therefore more apt to succeed economically, through proximity to a beautiful city center was unproven and unproveable. Ultimately, in the 1901 plan for Washington D.C., the City Beautiful movement was unsuccessful only in the one thing it expressly allied itself with--Progressive moral and economic reform in the urban center."

Works Progress Administration (Couvrette)

• American artists had gained interest and approval in the late 1920s, but that interest crashed along with the stock market
• collectors didn't have the money to invest in art
• affected both the mediocre and the previously highly-respected/wealthy artists
• fear of a diminished American culture if artists were forced to work outside of their field
• no real precedent for federal supported arts up to this point
• programs had to balance need for employing artists with expectation of high-quality art
• Treasury Dept. responsible for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) and Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture
• PWAP
• first federal work-relief program designed to meet the needs of artists
• based off Mexican program where government sponsored mural paintings
• painted murals in non-federal public buildings and public parks to foster interest in the arts
• organization dictated the style of the paintings
• The Section: 1% for the Arts
• "One percent of the money appropriated for the erection of new public buildings was to be set aside for the allocation of the best art by the best artists"
• Treasury Relief Art Program (TRAP): meant to provide embellishment for the buildings whose budgets did not allow the usual one percent of funds for this purpose
• Fine Arts Project (division of WPA)
• employed over 5000 artists: included fine artists but also included craftsmen, commercial/applied artists, etc.
• mural painting was especially important: got artists out of studio and into a public/social context
• "Unlike the PWAP and the Section, with their reliance upon the skills of proven artists to produce art of the highest quality, the WPA/FAP was interested not in creating individual masterpieces but in inspiring a broad cultural movement in the United States"
• did not dictate style, but subjects of murals did have to be American
• inspired new belief that art should belong to all people, not just elites
• "The interest of the federal government in raising the cultural standards of the general public led to the establishment of a series of community art centers and experimental galleries across the United States. It was found that there was almost no public venue for the exhibition and teaching of art at the neighborhood level... These new centers and galleries were to provide a sort of "cultural welfare" meant to balance the economic welfare supplied by other New Deal programs."
• provided free entertainment and thus received high numbers of visitors--even those who 10 years before would not have been interested
• exhibitions were usually planned with consideration for community interests 
• goal of raising interest in the arts, particularly among children
• additional goal of creating a diverse yet unified American identity

"Unemployed Arts" (Fortune, 1937)

• federal government had been acting more like a charity with its monetary support until it started to implement work programs
• work relief was more successful when diversified to fit different skill sets
• goal of the WPA was the employment of the unemployed
• Federal Arts Project created a huge response--thousands of artists were involved and hundreds of thousands became visitors/audience/students in newly created arts organizations
• brought American artist and audience closer together through face-to-face settings
• relatively loose requirements for being a participant in the Federal Arts Project, allowed for large numbers of participants from a variety of backgrounds
• all artists were not seen as geniuses and virtuosos, but were appreciated for creating an art movement that became a vital functioning part of the country's cultural scheme
• goal of creating widest possible public interest in art and providing greatest possible social services
• leaders of FAP were more associated with the arts and art-making than with the federal government
• galleries became an important part of towns and the education aspect of communities
• galleries and other arts organizations provided hundreds of thousands with their first contact with art and first art instruction (wasn't provided by public schools at the time)
• government became one of the largest patrons of art in the world
• most admission prices/tickets were free, and others were usually low-priced
• question of whether or not the art projects are good enough to qualify for their large price tag

Questions/Comments:

• How are the goals of these early cultural planning/policy projects similar/different from those of modern day cultural planning?
• Why did the government of the 1930s decide it was worthwhile to preserve culture in the time of recession/depression but the current government seems less willing?
• How/why did goals evolve from aesthetics to community building? Have they actually evolved in that way?
• government sponsored arts organizations and galleries became relatively prevalent during the new Deal, but are practically non-existent now
• look into People's Art Center in St Louis, primarily for African-American students; able to keep going into 1960s after federal funding ended ('43)
• What sort of assessments or evaluations were given to these groups? What were the organizational dynamics like?
• transition from creation of organizations to funding of organizations on the federal level
• Did interest on federal level generate local/city-wide projects?

Further reading:
Hines, Thomas S. "The Imperial Mall: The City Beautiful Movement and the Washington Plan of 1901-02"
Wilson, William H. The City Beautiful Movement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Becker, Heather. Art for the People [book]: discusses depression-era Chicago school murals