CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, THE (CUNY)

system of higher education institutions in New York, New York, U.S. It was created in 1961 to combine New York City's municipally supported colleges (now numbering 21, including the CUNY Baccalaureate Program). The university includes the Graduate School and University Center, New York's four original liberal arts colleges (City College of New York , Hunter College, Brooklyn College, and Queens College), six other four-year colleges, a four-year technical college, a law school, and six two-year community colleges; in addition, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine is affiliated with CUNY. The four-year institutions are largely autonomous. An open-admissions policy inaugurated in 1970 makes all New York City residents who earn high school diplomas eligible for admission to a CUNY institution. The oldest of the CUNY colleges is the City College of New York, founded as the all-male Free Academy in 1847 by the New York City Board of Education, under the auspices of politician and diplomat Townsend Harris. It was chartered as a college in 1866. During the first half of the 20th century many of the city's civic and business leaders were students there, as were such prominent New York intellectuals as Sidney Hook and Irving Kristol. Women were first admitted to graduate programs in 1930, and the college was completely coeducational by 1951. Hunter College was founded in 1870 as a teacher-training institution for women. It added instruction at the college level in 1888, was fully accredited as a college in 1905, and began offering graduate instruction for both men and women in 1921; it became fully coeducational in 1964. The college now includes schools of nursing, health sciences, and social work. Brooklyn College, founded in 1930, and Queens College, founded in 1937, offer training in liberal arts and education. They also offer, with CCNY and other institutions, combined programs in engineering and health-related fields. The Graduate School and University Center, founded in 1961, is the only school in the CUNY system to offer the Ph.D. degree. The College of Staten Island, formed in 1976 by the merger of Richmond College (founded 1965) and Staten Island Community College (1955), offers liberal arts and vocational programs. York College (1966) offers liberal arts. Lehman College, formerly Hunter College's Bronx campus (opened 1931), joined CUNY in 1968; it offers liberal arts, education, communications, and health programs. Baruch College, founded in 1919 as part of CCNY, became a separate institution within the university in 1968; it specializes in business and public administration. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, founded in 1964, trains criminal-justice agency personnel and public-service professionals. Medgar Evers College, founded in 1969, serves a predominantly African-American student body. Urban planning Urban planning and redevelopment is aimed at fulfilling social and economic objectives that go beyond the physical form and arrangement of buildings, streets, parks, utilities, and other parts of the urban environment. Urban planning takes effect largely through the operations of government and requires the application of specialized techniques of survey, analysis, forecasting, and design. It may thus be described as a social movement, as a governmental function, or as a technical profession. Each aspect has its own concepts, history, and theories. Together they fuse into the effort of modern society to shape and improve the environment within which increasing proportions of humanity spend their lives: the city. The development of urban planning Early history There are examples from the earliest times of efforts to plan city development. Evidence of planning appears repeatedly in the ruins of cities in China, India, Egypt, Asia Minor, the Mediterranean world, and South and Central America. There are many signs: orderly street systems that are rectangular and sometimes radial; divisions of a city into specialized functional quarters; development of commanding central sites for palaces, temples, and what would now be called civic buildings; and advanced systems of fortifications, water supply, and drainage. Most of the evidence is in smaller cities, built in comparatively short periods as colonies. Often the central cities of ancient states grew to substantial size before they achieved governments capable of imposing controls. In Rome, for example, the evidence points to no planning prior to late applications of remedial measures. For several centuries during the Middle Ages, there was little building of cities in Europe. There is conflicting opinion on the quality of the towns that grew up as centres of church or feudal authority, of marketing or trade. They were generally irregular in layout, with low standards of sanitation. Initially, they were probably uncongested, providing ready access to the countryside and having house gardens and open spaces used for markets and fairs or grazing livestock. But, as the urban population grew, the constriction caused by walls and fortifications led to overcrowding and to the building of houses wherever they could be fitted in. It was customary to allocate certain quarters of the cities to different nationalities, classes, or trades, as in cities of East Asia in the present day. As these groups expanded, congestion was intensified. The physical form of medieval and Renaissance towns and cities followed the pattern of the village, spreading along a street, a crossroad, in circular patterns or in irregular shapesthough rectangular patterns tended to characterize some of the newer towns. Most streets were little more than footpathsmore a medium for communication than for transportationand even in major cities paving was not introduced until 1184 in Paris, 1235 in Florence, and 1300 in Lbeck. As the population of the city grew, walls were often expanded, but few cities at the time exceeded a mile in length. Sometimes sites were changed, as in Lbeck, and many new cities emerged with increasing populationfrequently about one day's walk apart. Towns ranged in population from several hundred to perhaps 40,000 (London in the 14th century). Paris and Venice were exceptions, reaching 100,000. Housing varied from elaborate merchant houses to crude huts and stone enclosures. Dwellings were usually two to three stories high, aligned in rows, and often with rear gardens or inner courts formed by solid blocks. Windows were small apertures with shutters, at first, and later covered with oiled cloth, paper, and glass. Heating improved from the open hearth to the fireplace and chimney. Rooms varied from the single room for the poor to differentiated rooms for specialized use by the wealthy. Space generally was at a premium. Privacy was rare and sanitation primitive. During the Renaissance, however, there were conscious attempts to plan features, such as logistically practical circulation patterns and encircling fortifications, which forced overbuilding as population grew. As late as the 1860s, the radial boulevards in Paris had military as well as aesthetic purposes. The grand plan, however, probably had as its prime objective the glorification of a ruler or a state. From the 16th to the end of the 18th century, many small cities and parts of large cities were laid out and built with monumental splendour. The result may have pleased and inspired the citizens, but it rarely contributed to the health or comfort of their homes or to the efficiency of manufacturing, distribution, or marketing. The planning concepts of the European Renaissance were transplanted to the New World. In particular, Pierre l'Enfant's plan for Washington, D.C. (1791), illustrated the strength and weakness of these concepts; it was a plan ably designed to achieve monumentality and grandeur in the siting of public buildings but was in no way concerned with the efficiency of residential, commercial, or industrial development. More prophetic of the layout of U.S. cities was the rigid, gridiron plan of Philadelphia, designed by William Penn (1682), with a layout of streets and lots (plots) adaptable to rapid changes in land use but wasteful of land and inefficient for traffic. The gridiron plan travelled westward with the pioneers, since it was the simplest method of dividing surveyed territory. Its special advantage was that a new city could be planned in the eastern offices of land companies and lots sold without buyer or seller ever seeing the site. The New England town also influenced later settlement patterns in the United States. The central commons, initially a cattle pasture, provided a focus of community life and a site for meetinghouse, tavern, smithy, and shops. It became the central square in county seats from the Alleghenies to the Pacific and remained the focus of urban activity. Also from the New England town came the tradition of the freestanding, single-family house. Set well back from the street and shaded by trees, it had an ornamental front yard and a working backyard and became the norm of American residential development. This was in contrast to the European town house, with its party wall and tiny fenced backyard.