The City Beautiful Movement

Creating the North American Landscape

by William H. Wilson

Winner of the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning HistoryWinner of the Outstanding Book in Architecture and Urban Planning Award from the Association of American Publishers 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 as an exercise in participatory politics aimed at changing the way citizens thought about cities.

Genres: Urban Planning, Urban, History

384 pages, Paperback

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.