ABSTRACT
The civic ethos which led to New York’s great plans can be traced back to another vigorous American city – a city which, by curious coincidence, has a close connection with the Milton Friedman’s school of monetarist economics, which later sought to belittle and destroy the very idea of planning. D. Burnham’s plan is often criticized for its monumental qualities, lacking concern for the neighbourhood, for family housing, or for the experience of individuals at street level. Doubtless inspired by Chicago’s pioneers, metropolitan planning took off in America in the early years of the twentieth century. The idealists, in the Regional Planning Association of America, led by Lewis Mumford, simply hated it. Strangely, just as the Moses bulldozer ran out of gas in the 1970s, the regional planning machine recovered its momentum. New York’s belief in big plans, first ignited in the 1920s, is carrying the city and its region forward into the twenty-first century.
