“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” These ringing words, attributed to Daniel Burnham, the brilliant architect who designed and built the renowned “White City” that housed the 1892–93 Columbian Exposition, have long moved the hearts of those who love great schemes of urban development. But Burnham is also remembered for inspiring America’s first comprehensive attempt to re-imagine a major city, realized in an imaginative, beautifully produced, and visually appealing masterpiece of stirring prose and stunning illustration, “The Plan of Chicago” (1909).

Early 20th-century Chicago, the product of private enterprise restrained only by individual taste and political corruption, was largely filthy, ugly, polluted, and unsanitary, with unpaved streets and wide swaths of railroad tracks dividing and isolating much of the city from itself. Burnham believed all this could be changed, and that with major alterations Chicago could become a greater and more beautiful city. His “experience, wisdom, imagination, vigor, resolve, and charisma” — Mr. Smith portrays him as a wonderfully attractive man — sold about 300 wealthy Chicagoans on financing “The Plan.”

Carl Smith’s “The Plan of Chicago” (University of Chicago Press, 183 pages, $22) describes the complex process through which Burnham assembled his team of planners and how they gathered information, drew conclusions, drafted a report, created and selected illustrations, and published an extraordinary book. He also unveils the extensive and largely successful propaganda campaign to gain official and popular support for “The Plan”‘s recommendations, extending even to having it taught in the public schools.

For a generation, “The Plan of Chicago” defined the discussion of urban planning and development in Chicago. Burnham’s associates produced similar plans for other cities; and among urban planners even today, “The Plan” remains a source of inspiration.

Yet Burnham irresistibly recalls Winston Churchill’s quip about Lord Rosebery: Like many reformers, he had a taste for dictation. Burnham apparently believed his honesty, good faith, and professional skills were sufficient to justify the radical changes inherent in placing restraints, however mild, on an untrammeled free market in real estate. He invested his genius for persuasion in a few wealthy men gathered in a board room or a club library, over good wines and a groaning board. Once his elite friends had effectively defined the terms of the discussion that would flow from publishing “The Plan,” the question became one of salesmanship, complete with advertising campaigns and a full-time publicist. Mr. Smith notes that the people who financed “The Plan” were largely upper middle class men with a “highintentioned if sometimes self-righteous trust in their own motives and idea … [who] saw no conflict between [their] best interests and those of the city as a whole.”

“The Plan”‘s inherent weaknesses were the presumptions that flowed from its elitist base of support. Public policy is best formed through diversity: “The Plan” might have been richer had the persons sipping the wine around the conference table not been all of the same color, sex, and economic class. For example, Jane Addams, a practical reformer with a profound understanding of the urban working poor and underclass, was already worldrenowned for her work at Chicago’s Hull House. But she was merely consulted by the men who developed “The Plan.” Other contemporaries, ranging from small businessmen to muckraking journalists, argued that implementing the Plan would only benefit the businessmen who had financed it “since they would profit from the changes they proposed while Chicago’s citizens footed the bill.”

Finally, as Mr. Smith notes, “The Plan” betrays an abstraction that becomes nearly inhuman. Most telling, perhaps, are its lavish illustrations. Mr. Smith describes Jules Guerin’s rendering opposite the title page, “a bird’seye view of … Lake Michigan meeting the settled prairie, the vantage required to see the enormous expanse on display . . . so celestially high that the curvature of the earth is visible. Land and water strike the eye less as physical features than as epic masses.”What is missing from this, and from most of the illustrations, are human beings living amid the vast, heroic buildings and bridges envisioned by the planners.

Although both Burnham and “The Plan” have iconic status, they have never lacked for critics. Burnham’s contemporary and rival, architect Louis Sullivan, dismissed him as merely “a colossal merchandiser.” The New Yorker’s Lewis Mumford criticized Burnham as primarily interested in pumping up land values. And Jane Jacobs too condemned Burnham, perhaps because the Chicagoan, who viewed the city’s streets as merely a means of transportation, had failed to anticipate her belief that urban street life — the smallscale communities of merchants and public institutions — was in itself integral to what made city life worth living.

Yet the measure of the greatness of “The Plan of Chicago” is that nearly a century after its publication, men and women still argue about it. Carl Smith’s book is a concise, splendidly accessible, and beautifully constructed introduction to a seminal work of American urban planning and its enduring influence on Chicago and other American cities. He writes particularly well, without padding or academic jargon, and admirable self-restraint: He tells us just enough about the men and the times that created “The Plan of Chicago” to make us want to learn more on our own. One can offer no higher praise for a writer.

Mr. Bryk last wrote in these pages about the London cholera epidemic of 1854.