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Chicago 1930 maps4/3/2023 ![]() ![]() This page provides access only to a small proportion of the Midwestern urban planning maps that are held at the University of Chicago Map Collection. We would be very grateful for information that would allow us to identify these publications with greater precision. We have included several maps whose compilers, publishers, and dates of production we do not know. The maps' compilers expected that the cities would continue to grow indefinitely-and that their central portions would become considerably denser. The maps indexed on this Web page predate this decline. Since the 1950s, Detroit and, to a lesser extent, a few other Midwestern cities have lost a substantial part of their population and housing stock. Some of the larger cities portrayed in these maps have become notorious for their problems. We have also included a few other kinds of planning maps: for example, a census-block map of Detroit a parking-lot map of central Detroit a street plan for Milwaukee and a map of Milwaukee's Parklawn, one of the country's first housing projects. A 1939 map shows that virtually all Minnesota cities had zoning laws by the end of the 1930s. ![]() Many, perhaps most, American cities-even small ones-promulgated similar laws over the next decade and a half *. The kind of land use regulation shown in these maps came late to the United States, but it spread quickly in the years after New York's 1916 adoption of what was apparently the first American city-wide zoning code. It is possible (but not provable) that most of the zoning of populated areas in the maps indexed below represents a radically simplified, idealized portrait of actual land use. Chicago's first land-use map was compiled explicitly to facilitate the writing of the city's first zoning ordinance. No one-at least before the era of large-scale "urban renewal"-would have proposed a zoning code for a settled neighborhood that involved a complete change in land use. The relationship between zoning and land use in American cities is close but not simple. Most of the maps are zoning or land-use maps. (For comparable maps of Chicago, see the companion Web page, Government Maps of Chicago in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.) ![]() Planning Maps of Midwestern Cities in the 1920s and 1930sĬlick on the links below to access scans of some of the government planning maps of Midwestern cities from the 1920s and 1930s that are held at the University of Chicago Library's Map Collection. ![]()
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