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A sweeping history of American cities and towns, and the utopian
aspirations that shaped them, by one of America's leading urban
planners and scholars. The first European settlers saw America as a
paradise regained. The continent seemed to offer a God-given
opportunity to start again and build the perfect community. Those
messianic days are gone. But as Alex Krieger argues in City on a
Hill, any attempt at deep understanding of how the country has
developed must recognize the persistent and dramatic consequences
of utopian dreaming. Even as ideals have changed, idealism itself
has for better and worse shaped our world of bricks and mortar,
macadam, parks, and farmland. As he traces this uniquely American
story from the Pilgrims to the "smart city," Krieger delivers a
striking new history of our built environment. The Puritans were
the first utopians, seeking a New Jerusalem in the New England
villages that still stand as models of small-town life. In the Age
of Revolution, Thomas Jefferson dreamed of citizen farmers tending
plots laid out across the continent in a grid of enlightened
rationality. As industrialization brought urbanization, reformers
answered emerging slums with a zealous crusade of grand civic
architecture and designed the vast urban parks vital to so many
cities today. The twentieth century brought cycles of suburban
dreaming and urban renewal-one generation's utopia forming the next
one's nightmare-and experiments as diverse as Walt Disney's EPCOT,
hippie communes, and Las Vegas. Krieger's compelling and richly
illustrated narrative reminds us, as we formulate new ideals today,
that we chase our visions surrounded by the glories and failures of
dreams gone by.
Eine Luxemburgerin erinnert sich an ihre Erlebnisse im Urwald des
Belgischen Kongo von 1950-1952. Der Alltag wurde zum Erlebnis.
Fifty years ago a landmark conference at Harvard University
established urban design as a distinct architectural and planning
practice. Today, with the world's urban population surpassing three
billion people, urban design has become more crucial than ever.
Indeed, the concerns that initially brought leading architects and
city planners together-including concerns over sprawl, pollution,
and aging infrastructure-have only intensified over the past half
century. In Urban Design, Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders have
assembled prominent figures in architecture, planning, and
landscape design to look back on the evolution of the discipline of
urban design; assess the current state of the field; and anticipate
the challenges posed by the unprecedented rate of urbanization,
particularly in the developing world, and how the profession will
need to adapt in order to confront them. The volume opens with
excerpts from transcripts of the 1956 Harvard conference followed
by essays that contextualize and critique its assumptions and
ambitions. Subsequent essays address such topics as the social
conscience of urban design and stake out the competing
sensibilities in the field, from New Urbanism to avant-garde. As
humanity becomes an urban species to a degree that was unimaginable
fifty years ago, this comprehensive volume seeks to encourage
today's designers to draw on the energy and messy vitality of
cities in shaping tomorrow's urban environments. Contributors:
Jonathan Barnett, Denise Scott Brown, Joan Busquets, Kenneth
Greenberg, John Kaliski, Timothy Love, Fumihiko Maki, Richard
Marshall, Eric Mumford, Michelle Provoost, Peter G. Rowe, Edward W.
Soja, Richard M. Sommer, Michael Sorkin, Emily Talen, Marilyn
Jordan Taylor, Wouter Vanstiphout, Charles Waldheim.
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