The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy

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. The contributors are Robert Fishman, John Thomas, Michael J. Lacey, James Westcoat, Jr., Alan Brinkley, Margaret Weir, Arnold R. Hirsch, Carl Abbott, Judith A. Martin and Sam Bass Warner, Jr, and Anne Whiston Spirn.