New Urbanism and American Planning The Conflict of Cultures [Hardcover]

New Urbanism and American Planning presents the history of American planners quest for good cities and shows how New Urbanism is a culmination of ideas that have been evolving since the nineteenth century. In her survey of the last hundred or so years of urbanist ideals, Emily Talen identifies four approaches to city-making, which she terms cultures: incrementalism, plan-making, planned communities, and regionalism. She shows how these cultures connect, overlap, and conflict and how most of the ideas about building better settlements are recurrent.

In the first part of the book Talen sets her theoretical framework and in the second part provides detailed analysis of her four cultures.She concludes with an assessment of the successes and failures of the four cultures and the need to integrate these ideas as a means to promoting good urbanism in America.

1. Introduction Defining American Urbanism  2. Framework  Four Urbanist Cultures  3. Principles  Urbanism vs. Anti-Urbanism  4. Incrementalism  Beauty, Redemption, Conservation and Complexity  5. Urban Plan-Making  the City Beautiful and the City Efficient  6. Planned Communities  7. Regionalism  8. Successes and Failures  9. Conclusion  the Survival of New Urbanism

This is a must read for anyone interested in contributing wisely to American urbanization. - Alex Krieger, Professor of Urban Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design

She brings a rich, coherent historical overview to a subject often adrift in the horse lattitudes of statistical analysis. - James Howard Kunstler

Talen is an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She received a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Slc