Publication Date

2026

Placement

First Prize

Class Year

2026

Department

History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health

Advisor

Deborah Streahle

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, Progressive Era reformers understood the American city not merely as disordered but as pathological—an environment that bred disease and eroded civic life. This thesis argues that the City Beautiful Movement (CBM), embodied in Washington's 1902 McMillan Plan, advanced a spatial logic it terms "green as cure:" the conviction that disciplined landscape design could function as a form of environmental medicine, restoring health to the urban body. Drawing on maps, planning documents, and congressional reports, the thesis shows how plans defined disorder, prescribed intervention, and embedded assumptions about race and belonging into the built environment. Yet the cure was never neutral—to heal the city, reformers first had to diagnose what was diseased, and those diagnoses fell unevenly, displacing certain working-class and Black communities in the name of sanitary order. This therapeutic logic did not end with the CBM era but persisted through federal housing policy, urban renewal, and contemporary wellness urbanism, consistently redistributing the benefits of environmental reform while concentrating its costs among those least able to resist. The effects of spatial healing, this thesis argues, depend less on the provision of green than on the political structures within which it is implemented.

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