The City Beautiful Movement

Creating the North American Landscape

by William H. Wilson

Awarded the Lewis Mumford Prize of The Society for American City and Regional Planning History and named Outstanding Book in Architecture and Urban Planning by the Association of American Publishers.

"A major contribution to the scholarship on the history of urban America and the history of American city planning... [Wilson's] discussion of the goals and political reform ideology of the City Beautiful advocates is the most thoughtful and widely researched analysis of this complex subject to haveappeared."--History.

Critics of the turn-of-the-century's City Beautiful Movement denounced its projects--broad, tree-lined boulevards and monumental but low-lying civic buildings--as grandiose and unnecessary. In this masterful analysis, William H. Wilson sees the movement as its founders did: as an exercise in participatory politics aimed at changing the way citizens thought about cities.

"An outstanding piece of scholarship."--Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin.

Genres: Urban Planning, Urban, History

171 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1964

Reviews

[Frank Stein · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jon Peterson did most of this better in "The Birth of City Planning in the United States," and this book should really be titled "How parks were built in the 1890s," but his studies of individual cities in the period are pretty insightful, and he makes a solid argument that the City Beautiful movement's power and significance have been underrated.