Library Guides: History of City Planning: Finding Local Information

Finding Public Records

Public records are important resources in researching the history of specific places. Local government agencies often maintain useful records, for example, building and water or utility permits and city block books. Note that older records may be held in preservation directory.com or public library special collections. Federal agencies also have materials related to historic buildings and places. Refer to the section "Other Resources" tabl for a list of local collections and archival sources.

The Investigative reporter's handbook: a guide to documents, databases and techniques. Brant Houston. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2021. See especially Chap. 23 Investigating Real Estate and Housing.
Paper trails: a guide to public records in California. Stephen Levine and Barbara T. Newcombe. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Center for Investigative Reporting; Sacramento: California Newspaper Publishers Association, 1996.

Finding Government Publications

Local and federal government publications can be great primary sources on the history of city planning. Use them to find records of public policy and community perspectives on diverse land use and community development issues. Many government documents are listed in The Library's catalogs; start with the Find it at UC catalog for complete coverage of the UC Berkeley campus libraries.

Directories:

State and local government on the net: a directory of official state, county, and city government Web sites(Piper Resources.
A surprising amount of city- and community-level information is available in U.S. Congressional publications. ProQuest Congressional and Congressional Research Service Reports provide indexing and abstracts of congressional publications.

Finding General Plans

General plans, comprehensive plans, master plans—often the only record of a community's formal physical and public policy intentions—by any name local plans are excellent primary sources for history of planning research. Technically a category of government publications, general plans are so valuable for history of 20th century city planning research that they merit their own section.

The Institute of Governmental Studies Library (IGSL) maintains the most comprehensive listing and collection of California city and county planning documents on the UC Berkeley campus. Ranging from the 1940s to the present, the collection is fully cataloged and items may not circulate.

The California Local Planning Documents Database is an index of California general plans owned by IGSL. The Database also includes codes, climate action plans, and financial documents.

Finding maps

The Earth Sciences and Map Library collection and the Bancroft Library have outstanding collections of maps, especially for California and the Bay Area.

Atlas of Historical County Boundaries

David Rumsey Map Collection This link opens in a new window
Focus on rare 18th and 19th century North and South American cartographic history materials. Includes historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia, and Africa. (Luna Insight)
Contains to date over 8,000 maps online and focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America cartographic history materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. [Note: This collection is also part of the UC Image Service and can be viewed in two ways: the Insight Browser allows users to view the collection using a web browser; the Luna Insight software provides greater functionality but must be downloaded.]
Digital Sanborn Maps, 1867-1970 This link opens in a new window
Access to large-scale maps of more than 12,000 American towns and cities.
Access to more than 660,000 large-scale maps of more than 12,000 American towns and cities. Sanborn maps are historical tools for urban specialists, social historians, architects, geographers, genealogists, local historians, planners, environmentalists. Founded in 1867 by D. A. Sanborn, the Sanborn Map Company was the primary American publisher of fire insurance maps for nearly 100 years.
Perry-Castaneda Library Map Collection This link opens in a new window
Access to maps for all regions of the world. Coverage is mostly 19th and 20th centuries with some going back to 980 C.E.
Provides electronic access to approximately 4,000 maps for all regions of the world. Maps cover mostly the 19th and 20th centuries though some represent time periods as far back as 980 C.E.

Planning Maps of Midwestern Cities in the 1920s and 1930s
University of Chicago Library’s Map Collection brings together several dozen planning maps of Midwestern cities in the 1920s and 1930s. Collection also includes a census-block map of Detroit, a fascinating parking-lot map of central Detroit, and a map of Milwaukee's Parklawn, which was one of the country's first housing projects.

See Image and Sound databases and Atlases, Maps and Gazetteers for more resources.

Finding images

Note that archives are often an excellent source of images. See Image databases for more resources.

American landscape and architectural design, 1850-1920
Harvard Univ. This collection of approximately 2,800 lantern slides represents an historical view of American buildings and landscapes built during the period 1850-1920. Offers views of cities, specific buildings, parks, estates and gardens. In addition to photographs, views include plans, maps, & models. Also indexed in the American Memory project.

ARTstor This link opens in a new window
A repository of more than 1 million high resolution art, architecture, and design images with associated catalog data.
A repository of more than 1 million digital images and associated catalog data. The collection is designed to be used by students and faculty for teaching and research in art history, as well as many other disciplines. Includes several collections such as: The Mellon International Dunhuang Archive; Native American Art and Culture from the Smithsonian; the Hartill Archive of Architecture and Allied Arts, etc. Short instructional videos are available online. See: Intro to the new ARTstor, Downloading images to PowerPoint, Batch download tool, and Making an image group.

California Heritage Collection

Cities and Buildings Database This link opens in a new window
A collection of over 12,000 digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world.
A collection of over 5000 digitized images of buildings and cities drawn from across time and throughout the world ranging from New York to Central Asia, from African villages to the Parc de la Villette. Users can now search for buildings by country, city, style, title, architect, date of construction, as well as other fields. Images have all been scanned from original slides or drawn from documents in the public domain. Freely available to anyone with access to the Web for use in the classroom, student study, or for individual research purposes.

Luna Commons

Old Maps Online This link opens in a new window
Digital historical maps from library collections around the world.
Gateway to digital historical maps from library collections around the world. Search by place-name or by clicking on the map window, and narrow by date. Search results then provide a direct link to the image map on the website of the host institution. A collaboration between the Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at the University of Portsmouth, UK and Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland.

San Francisco Public Library digitized images
Searchable by subject or neighborhood.

Secondary menu

History of City Planning: Finding Local Information

Finding Public Records

Finding Government Publications

Finding General Plans

Finding maps

Finding images