For nearly a century the Garden City movement has represented one end of a continuum in an ongoing debate about the future of the modern city. In 1898 Ebenezer Howard envisioned an experimental community as the alternative to huge, teeming cities. Small, planned "garden cities" girdled by greenbelts were to serve in time as the "master key" to a higher, more cooperative stage of civilization based on ecologically balanced communities. Howard soon founded an international planning movement which ever since has represented a remarkable blend of accommodation to and protest against urban changes and the rise of the suburbs. In this interconnected history of the Garden City movement in the United States and Britain, Buder examines its influence, strengths and limitations. Howard's garden city, he shows, joined together two very different types of late-nineteenth-century experimental communities, creating a tension never fully resolved. One approach, utopian and radical in nature, challenged conventional values; the other, the model industrial towns of "enlightened" capitalists, reinforceed them. Buder traces this tension through planning history from the nineteenth-century world of visionaries, philanthropy, and self help into our own with its reliance on the expert, bureaucracy, and governmental policy, shedding light on the complex changes in the way we have thought in the twentieth century about community, urban design, and indeed the process of change. His final chapters examine the world-wide enthusiasm for "New Towns" between 1945-1975 and recent political and social trends which challenge many fundamental assumptions of modern planning.

Americans love ""this year's model,"" relying on the ""new"" to be always ""improved."" Enthusiasm for the new, says Stanley Buder, is essential to American business, where innovation and change stoke the engines of economic energy. To really understand the history of business in America, he argues, we must understand the intertwining dynamics of social and business values. In a history spanning over three hundred years, Buder examines the enveloping expansion of the market economy, the laggardly use of government to modify or control market forces, the rise of consumerism, the shifting role of small business, and much more. He concludes with the explosive development of business in the 1990s and its aftermath of crises and scandals. Along the way, he analyzes the ways American social values foster an entrepreneurial ethos and why the identification of change with progress provides a distinctive and provocative theme in American life. Buder studies American business as not only an engine of wealth accumulation but also an important generator and reflector of American values. Capitalizing on Change is the first full-length business history in recent years to make this relationship clear.