Join Professor Henry Binford as he discusses his latest book, From Improvement to City Planning: Spatial Management in Cincinnati from the Early Republic through the Civil War Decade

In the 19th Century, Many Americans believed that remaking city environments could also remake citizens. From Improvement to City Planning examines how the experiences of city living in the early republic prompted city dwellers to think about and shape urban space.

He looks specifically at Cincinnati, Ohio, then the largest and most important interior city west of the Appalachian Mountains. He shows that it was not just industrialization, but also beliefs about morality, race, health, poverty, and “slum” environments, that demanded an improvement of urban space. As such, movements for public parks and large-scale sanitary engineering in the 1840s and ’50s initiated the beginning of modern city planning. However, there were limitations and consequences to these efforts.

Henry C. Binford is a social historian of the 19th century United States, focuses on urbanization and city growth. He is Professor of History at Northwestern University and the author of The First Suburbs: Residential Communities on the Boston Periphery, 1815-1860.

This hybrid program is free and open to the public.

Copies of From Improvement to City Planning are available for sale via Joseph-Beth Cincinnati.

From Improvement to City Planning is part of The Urban Life, Landscape, and Policy Series, edited by David Stradling, Larry Bennett, and Davarian Baldwin, that was founded by the late Zane L. Miller to publish books that examine past and contemporary cities. While preserving the series’ foundational focus on the policy, planning, and environmental issues so central to metropolitan life, we also join scholarly efforts to push the boundaries of urban studies. We are committed to publishing work at the shifting intersections of cultural production, community formation, and political economy that shape cities at all scales, from the neighborhood to the transnational.