The Failure Of Industrial City Planning: Gary, Indiana, 1906–1910

Abstract

This article examines the optimistic beginnings and the eventual failings of Gary, Indiana—the twentieth century's largest planned city. The town was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation primarily to house the huge labor force required by the company's new steel mills along Lake Michigan. “Rule of thumb” planning and ill-conceived housing policies, however, contained the seeds of later problems. The gridiron imposed a dreary uniformity on the city; high-priced housing forced low-paid immigrant workers into slum housing put up by private real estate developers and builders in Gary's unplanned but growing “south side.” The Gary experience suggests some of the inherent contradictions in the planning process. Especially, it reveals the persistence of conflict between human needs and dominant cultural and entrepreneurial values—conflicts which have repeatedly compromised and undermined ostensible public interest goals and caused planning failures.

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