Eric Sandweiss

This book starts with St. Louis’s founding and really goes only to the formal institution of zoning in the early 1920s. Sandweiss argues that the city’s development was a result of constant tension between small, fenced-off corners (the house, the neighborhood block) and the wider world, and the city was an unstable middle ground. This is a history told from the point of view of white (sometimes Anglo and sometimes “ethnic”) officials and businessmen, who were often tied by at least running in the same social circles, if not the same families. Throughout the nineteenth century, a main conflict was over improving roads—something the city wanted the directly benefited landowners to pay for, and something those landowners wanted to be a shared burden given the presumably shared benefit in making the city function better. The balance changed from time to time, and the city enacted special assessments on the local landowners—but that meant that only wealthy neighborhoods got good roads, because only they could pay for them. Technology changes, but not politics. By the twentieth century, the leading lights of the city said outright that the city was “a great business establishment” and thus needed planning. Given this conception, it was no surprise that some people held more “shares” in the city than others, and deserved a greater voice. Although zoning and comprehensive planning arrived in the mid-1910s, just the time when the white majority of St. Louis voted for racial zoning excluding blacks from living in white areas and vice versa, race doesn’t play a big part of Sandweiss’s story, though it gets hard to ignore near the end.

I did love the bit in the intro where Sandweiss discusses nearby Wildwood’s attempts to create a community through New Urbanist principles, where the contractor-planners “flatter their client’s [Wildwood’s] revolutionary spirit with talk of the ‘Jeffersonian’ grid, as though a community of sturdy husbandmen were only awaiting the arrival of front porches and four-way stop signs to make its presence known.” Still, the built environment does shape behavior, which is why there’s always so much concern about it among homeowners and local officials.… (més)