The City Beautiful Movement and Discourse on Urban Space

 

The City Beautiful Movement and Discourse on Urban Space

Kate Blatchford

Spurred on by Chicago’s World Columbian 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 campaigns for new regulations on ‘unsightly’ things such as billboards.  The extent to which the movement succeeded varied by location.  This paper uses discourse analysis to examine how language was used to frame urban space in contemporary newspaper articles related to the movement.  In particular, it considers the use of the past, present, and future as well as positive and negative references to urban space.  Articles regarding the movement in Washington D.C., New York City, and Detroit were examined.  The paper finds that negative framing was used in discussion of the present, while the potential future offered by the movement was framed positively, and references to the past were mixed.  It also finds differences between the cities in the proportion of positive and negative references, which may be related to differences in the forms the movement took in those locations.