City Beautification Projects

The City Beautiful Movement, launched in the late 19th and early 20th century, is often celebrated as a golden age of urban reform. Schools teach it as a time when cities became walkable, clean, and "civilized." But beneath the facades and elegant parks was something more sinister. Removal of anyone who didn’t visually fit.

Origins: The White City and the Visual Ideal

The movement began with the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, a massive showcase of white marble buildings, symmetrical streets, and neoclassical architecture. This event, dubbed the “White City,” became a template for urban design across the United States. The goal was not just sanitation and order — it was visual unity, a curated environment free of perceived chaos or disorder.

“The White City represented an ideal vision of America, one that was visually purified and tightly ordered.” — Vancouver Public Space Network

City leaders across America, inspired by this “ideal,” began rebuilding their cities to reflect similar aesthetics, especially in Washington D.C., Detroit, San Francisco, and Chicago.

But what defined “disorder” often had less to do with infrastructure and more to do with class, race, and visual nonconformity.

Faces as Infrastructure

While the movement officially focused on cities, its logic soon extended to human appearance. If a city needed symmetrical buildings and clean lines, so too did its citizens.

At the same time beautification spread, society became increasingly hostile to individuals with features considered low-tier: large or hooked noses, asymmetrical faces, facial scarring, lazy eyes, or non-European bone structures.

“Plastic surgery, once used for treating injuries, shifted during this time to ‘correct’ undesirable features — particularly ethnic ones.” — The Conversation, “The Ugly History of Cosmetic Surgery”

This era saw the rise of early cosmetic surgery, particularly rhinoplasty. Immigrants — especially Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European populations — were pressured to undergo surgery to “pass” as visually acceptable in American society.

Magazines and stores sold home devices for “fixing” ugliness — chin straps, eyelid tape, facial molds — reinforcing the message: If you’re not born attractive, fix it or disappear.

“Between 1900 and 1930, dozens of inventions were patented for ‘beauty correction’... marketed to women whose appearance kept them from social success.” — Mental Floss

The normie narrative said it was for "progress." But in truth, the projects made cities safe for normies and Chads by removing anyone who reminded them of biological failure or low SMV.

What couldn’t be fined under lookism was redesigned out of existence.

The McMillan Plan and the Erasure of “Blight”

One of the most well-known implementations of the City Beautiful ideology was the McMillan Plan of 1902, which reshaped central Washington, D.C. The plan introduced wide boulevards, parks modeled after European landscapes, and a unified monumental core. However, its execution required the displacement of poor Black communities and working-class neighborhoods that were deemed incompatible with the plan’s aesthetic goals (Planetizen).

Though reformers framed these actions as slum clearance or public improvement, critics argue that the real motive was to remove areas considered visually offensive. “Blight,” in this context, often meant housing occupied by people who were poor, disabled, or racially marginalized.