Washington, D.C.—History of Planning and Urbanism

by

Zachary M. Schrag

• LAST MODIFIED: 24 July 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780190922467-0102

Introduction

For thousands of years, the Piscataway and other Native peoples have lived along the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers. In the eighteenth century, British-descended colonists established the river ports of Georgetown in Maryland and Alexandria in Virginia. Then, in 1790, Congress passed the Residence Act, allowing President George Washington to select a place along the Potomac River to serve as the permanent seat of government of the United States. In 1800, the new city, now named for Washington, became the capital. Visitors often regard Washington as a collection of museums and monuments, and members of Congress—to whom the Constitution grants the power to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever” in the District of Columbia—may see it as a social laboratory in which they can test their latest theories of education, law enforcement, or other policies. But hundreds of thousands of District of Columbia residents, and millions of suburbanites, think of the metropolitan region as a place to live and work. Scholars have explored these multiple experiences of the region and the frequent intersections among them. The story of the Washington region is as much one of people and communities as of plans and plazas.

General Overviews

By global standards, Washington is still a young city, its quarter-millennium history brief compared to that of Kyoto, Baghdad, or Rome. This youth allows scholars to trace large sections of the city’s history in detail in single-volume works. Some focus on the city’s planning and architecture, while others emphasize its people and neighborhoods. Gillette 2006 offers the most compelling synthesis of Washington’s dual nature as a physically beautiful landscape that has long failed to serve all of its residents. Abbott 1999, Daum and Mauch 2005, Luria 2006, and Rule 2023 all present perspectives on the nature of a capital city, while Asch and Musgrove 2017, Cary 1996, and Smith 2010 offer stories perhaps more typical of urban social history.

• Abbott, Carl. Political Terrain: Washington, D.C., from Tidewater Town to Global Metropolis. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.

  A musing on Washington’s place in the nation and the world, considering not only its Northern and Southern identities, but also its international role, and even a comparison to Sunbelt cities farther south and west.

• Asch, Chris Myers, and George Derek Musgrove. Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

  DOI: 10.5149/northcarolina/9781469635866.001.0001

  As its subtitle indicates, this book emphasizes racial conflict and cooperation in Washington’s history from the seventeenth century through the early twenty-first century. Chapter introductions tie those themes to extant neighborhoods and buildings.

• Cary, Francine Curro, ed. Urban Odyssey: A Multicultural History of Washington, D.C. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. (Reprinted in 2003 as Washington Odyssey.)

  Though often portrayed in simple biracial terms, the people of Washington have come from many backgrounds. These essays show that the white and African American communities have not been monolithic, and they have been joined by Washingtonians of Indigenous, Latino, and Asian descent.

• Daum, Andreas, and Christof Mauch, eds. Berlin—Washington, 1800–2000: Capital Cities, Cultural Representation, and National Identities. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

  Written in the wake of Berlin’s reestablishment as capital of a unified Germany, these essays consider what it means to be a capital city, in all its senses.

• Gillette, Howard, Jr. Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. Repr. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006.

  Originally published in 1995. If you read one book on the history of Washington, choose this, and if you plan to read more than one, start here. Gillette persuasively braids the two dominant narratives of the city’s history: the grand plans for streets, monuments, and buildings and the dismal schemes of dispossession and neglect of civil rights.

• Gilmore, Matthew. Washington DC History Resources.

  Resources compiled by Matthew Gilmore, the longtime editor of H-DC, the H-Net network on Washington, DC, history and culture.

• Luria, Sarah. Capital Speculations: Writing and Building Washington, D.C. Durham, NH: University Press of New England, 2006.

  A literature critic by training, Luria imaginatively pairs “spaces and texts” as “speculative structures,” showing how such figures as George Washington, Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and Henry Adams both found meaning and imparted it in the city’s buildings and streets.

• Rule, Elizabeth. Indigenous DC: Native Peoples and the Nation’s Capital. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2023.

  As residents, delegates, activists, and artists, Native people have shaped Washington and leveraged its symbolic power.

• Smith, Kathryn S., ed. Washington at Home: An Illustrated History of Neighborhoods in the Nation’s Capital. 2d ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.

  Essays on twenty-six residential neighborhoods in the District of Columbia, from Georgetown, which predates the establishment of the District, through more peripheral neighborhoods established in later decades and centuries. The book blends historical descriptions and photographs with portraits of these neighborhoods in the early twenty-first century.

• Washington History. 1989–.

  Founded in 1897 as Records of the Columbia Historic Society, this publication gained a new name and format in 1989. In both versions, it has told the story of local Washington, often connecting to larger national themes. Most years since 1993 feature listings of recent scholarship on the city, compiled by Matthew Gilmore.