For much of history, urban planning as we know it didn’t exist. Sure, there were cities with zoning ordinances and building codes, but ones thoroughly planned from scratch with heavily controlled development are largely a recent phenomenon. So a few years ago, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (known as SPUR) assembled ten key illustrations to summarize the twists and turns planners took to get where we are today.

Illustrations like this one of the Garden City from the early 1900s are powerful things, able to distill complex ideas down into compelling graphics. The idea in this case was to create greenbelts for urban dwellers and keep urban centers limited to populations of just over 30,000 people. Along similar lines, Le Corbusier’s “Towers in the Park” vision incorporated vast open spaces, but instead of spreading out, it pushed up, proposing people live in towers. This idea heavily shaped urban design in America, and public housing projects in particular.
More known for his architecture than his urban planning ideas, Frank Lloyd Wright had a lot of thoughts on how people should live and work outside of the actual houses and offices he built. His ideas for things like Broadacre City were more rural than urban, taking large plots of land and turning them into family housing in which each person would live on an acre of land. If implemented, this idea would have turned the entire country effectively into a giant mega-suburb...