Another side of the Burnham Plan

When we think of the Burnham Plan we think of what it bought to the urban environment, the City Beautiful movement, Michigan Avenue and the lakefront, practically everything we value in this city as good and true. We don't think of suburban sprawl and all the destructive elements that were brought about by the rise of the automobile. Yet Burnham was a great advocate of the automobile as an invention that brought liberation to the "multitudes of people who formerly were condemned to pass their entire time in the city."

In the latest post of The Urbanophile, Aaron M. Renn writes about the machine that Burnham saw as beneficial to development of the urban landscape and how we are coping now for better and worse with those ideas.

A must read.