The Devil Is the White City

 

This blog is not called Admiring Burnham. It’s called Battling Burnham.

To understand why, we have to go back to 1893 and the Chicago World’s Fair. There, Daniel Burnham and his colleagues unveiled the White City, a spectacular, gleaming vision of classical architecture, perfect symmetry, and grand, ordered boulevards. It was a flawless aesthetic utopia, dazzling millions and laying the blueprint for the City Beautiful movement that would dominate American planning for the next half-century.

The book, The Devil in the White City, focuses on the serial killer who operated in its shadow, but for urbanists, the true Devil was the central idea itself.

The Tyranny of the Facade

Burnham’s White City was planning as a scenographic art form. It was beautiful, but it was also utterly empty, temporary, and centrally controlled. It was a triumph of appearance over function.

The central, tragic trap of the White City ideology is the belief that if you improve a city’s appearance, you have improved the city itself. This aesthetic trap elevated:

• Order over Activity: Wide, empty plazas over dense, active squares.

• Symmetry over Surprise: Predictable, monumental facades over the organic, mixed-use texture of daily life.

• The View from Above over The View from the Street: The perspective of the planner, the elite, or the visitor over the perspective of the resident, the worker, or the shop owner.

When this aesthetic was replicated across America—in massive urban renewal projects, superblocks, and sterilized downtown corridors—it did not lead to a City Beautiful. It led to sterile, unloved, and ultimately unsafe places. The problem was not the beauty itself, but the monomaniacal focus on beauty to the exclusion of humanity.

The Jacobsean Revelation: Planning for the People

The entire course of urban studies shifted in the mid-20th century, largely due to one woman: Jane Jacobs. She forced us to turn our gaze away from the grand architectural blueprints of the Burnhams of the world and look down at the sidewalk.

Jacobs taught us that the health of a city is not measured by its plaster facades but by the intricacy of its life. We learned that:

1. Safety is not provided by symmetry, but by eyes on the street. The messy, mixed-use complexity that Burnham hated is the very thing that keeps a neighborhood safe and alive.

2. Innovation is not born in grand plazas, but in cheap, old buildings. The economic slack and low rents provided by un-“improved” properties are the necessary incubators for new businesses and culture.

3. Community is built with time, not steel. The social capital that makes a neighborhood resilient cannot be planned; it can only be protected.

The battle is simple: Burnham planned for structures. Jacobs planned for people.

The Enduring Battle

The White City’s ideology still haunts us. Every time a city attempts to solve a social problem with a shiny new building, or every time a developer liquidates a vital, messy neighborhood for a "luxury" replacement, we are still succumbing to the aesthetic tyranny of Burnham’s vision.

Battling Burnham is about rejecting the idea that urban improvement is a simple matter of better design or higher property value. It is a commitment to the hard, slow, invisible work of planning for the density of human social interaction, the diversity of local economies, and the longevity of community life.

We fight the White City not because we dislike beauty, but because we believe that a truly beautiful city is one that functions beautifully for all who live there.