The Woodrow Wilson Center Press
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 Planing Tradition reevaluates those planners and their times in a series of essays by some of today's preeminent urbanists. Their chapters discuss principles proposed for American urban planning and describe recent experiences in New Orleans, Portland, Chicago, and Boston.
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Chapter List
Foreward, Michael J. Lacey
1. The American Planning Tradition, An Introduction and Interpretation, Robert Fishman
Part One - Two Traditions
2. Holding the Middle Ground, John L. Thomas
3. The Metropolitan Tradition in American Planning, Robert Fishman
Part Two - The Quest for National Planning
4. Federalism and National Planning: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy, Michael J. Lacey
5. "Watersheds" in Regional Planning, James L. Wescoat, Jr.
6. The National Resources Planning Board and the Reconstruction of Planning, Alan Brinkley
7. Planning Environmentalism, and Urban Poverty: The Political Failure of National Land-Use Planning Legislation, 1970-1975, Margaret Weir
Part Three - Recreating the "Commons": The Local Experience
8. Race and Renewal in the Cold War's South: New Orleans, 1947-1968, Arnold R. Hirsch
9. The Capital of Good Planning: Metropolitan Portland since 1970, Carl J. Abbott
10. Local Initiative and Metropolitan Repetition: Chicago, 1972-1990, Judith A. Martin and Sam Bass Warner, Jr.
11. Reclaiming Common Ground: Water, Neighborhoods, and Public Places, Anne Whiston Spirn