Redefining Urban Space: Language in the City Beautiful Movement

Redefining Urban Space: Language in the City Beautiful Movement

Kate Blatchford

Spurred on by Chicago’s World Colombian Exposition in 1893, the City Beautiful movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to improve American cities through ‘beautification’.  This took the form in some places of monumental building or city planning, and in others of a new support for municipal art.  The extent to which the movement succeeded varied by location.  Language used to describe and define urban space has a very real effect on how that space is viewed, and therefore how it is experienced and ultimately what is done with it.  This paper examines how language was used by and about the City Beautiful movement in order to further the goals of the movement.  In particular, it examines how urban space and landscapes were defined and framed by newspaper articles contemporary to the movement.  Articles regarding the movement in Washington D.C., New York City, and Detroit were examined.  Through discourse analysis, the paper finds that negative framing was used in discussion of the past and present of the city, while the potential future offered by the movement was framed positively.