American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy FROM THE PUBLISHER
The past half-century's radical transformation of American cities and regions has paradoxically stimulated our interest in older forms of cities and renewed our respect for the planning tradition that created them. Today, with everything urban and public perpetually in crisis, we turn attentively toward the figures who shaped our cities and left a magnificent legacy of public spaces, public transit, public parks, public libraries, public schools, public health, and public safety.
The American Planning Tradition reevaluates those planners and their times in a series of essays by some of today's preeminent urbanists. These contributors view such antecedents as Albert Gallatin, Frederick Law Olmsted, Daniel Burnham, Edward Bennett, and Lewis Mumford not merely as precursors who prepared the way for the revelations of modern planning theory, but as contemporaries and even prophets who struggled with many of the same problems that afflict us, and responded with more vision, confidence, and hope than we seem to have today. Their chapters discuss principles proposed for American urban planning, cover a series of national efforts at planning for transportation, resources, and the environment, and describe recent experiences in New Orleans, Portland, Chicago, and Boston.
FROM THE CRITICS
Booknews
Looking back to earlier forms of cities in the US, modern urbanists reassess the work of such planners as Albert Gallatin, Frederick Law Olmstead, Daniel Burnham, Clarence Stein, and Lewis Mumford. They find in them not merely precursors and pioneers, but contemporaries and even prophets. They also show how that legacy is expressed in national efforts to plan transportation, resources and the environment as well as recent experiences in New Orleans, Portland, Chicago, and Boston. Distributed in the US by Johns Hopkins U. Press. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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