> Curiously, urban planners were absent — the profession barely existed at the time.
Huh? Wouldn't it have been even more curious to include people who didn't exist?
Huh? Wouldn't it have been even more curious to include people who didn't exist?
> His decisions favoring highways over public transit helped create the modern suburbs of Long Island and influenced a generation of engineers, architects, and urban planners who spread his philosophies across the nation.
Hippodamus (5th century BC) was described by Aristotle as "the first city planner". Europe is full of examples of detailed urban planning dating back a millennium or more.
Roman cities were carefully planned out to ensure transport, water supply, defence capabilities etc.
After the Roman expansion, we have tons of plan-drawings for new city developments across Europe spanning hundreds of years.
The US too had any number of prominent examples of detailed city planning dating back to e.g. Pierre L'Enfant's plan for Washington D.C. in 1791.
It might be more reasonable to say that in the US, city planners were still not considered relevant to planning major transport infrastructure. City planners were employed to handle the layout of the interior of cities, and more often landmarks and politically important parts of the downtown areas. Why would you consult them when you wanted to figure out how to move people between cities? It was not seen as their domain.
Europe was different in this respect mostly because Europe already had the road networks, and population density along them, that means building freeways have been largely about upgrading/replacing existing "working" road connections that were already integrated into the urban fabric, sometimes through centuries, or even dating back to Roman times, and much less about creating entirely new road connections.
Add on to this difference that freeways were seen as a sign of the future even in Europe to the point where e.g. the London suburb where I live was proud to get a flyover cutting straight through the historic city centre in the 50's - it passes right by a market dating back to the 1300's, and a church dating back to some time before 960... Today it stands as a monument to the lack of respect for the integrity of the town the planners at the time had; then it was a monument to progress.
In other words, the fact of the profession barely existing at that time is not a premise to the curiosity of their absence. For more of this, you should follow me on Twitter where I explain why jokes are funny.