Klemek's much-anticipated and greatly needed transatlantic pursuit of modernist planning and its failures does not disappoint. With deep research and sparkling insight, Klemek brings to life the urban dreams of planners, architects, public officials, activists, and social scientists in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The collapse of urban renewal is a complex story, and Klemek captures it with subtlety ... Read moreand wisdom.
Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumptio Klemek s much-anticipated and greatly needed transatlantic pursuit of modernist planning and its failures does not disappoint. With deep research and sparkling insight, Klemek brings to life the urban dreams of planners, architects, public officials, activists, and social scientists in the United States, Canada, and Europe. The collapse of urban renewal is a complex story, and Klemek captures it with subtlety and wisdom.
Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America Christopher Klemek offers fresh insights into topics of broad interest above all, the failure of urban renewal programs and into well-known personalities such as Jane Jacobs and Denise Scott Brown. This book is the first to add international dimensions to its subject, recasting the story of US urban renewal as the end of a transatlantic consensus. A compelling and original book.
Brian Ladd, author of Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age Christopher Klemek has written an erudite transnational history of modernist planning and its discontents. Sweeping from Berlin to Toronto, from London to New York, and from Philadelphia to Boston, Klemek takes intellectual history to the streets. This is a major contribution to the fields of urbanism, architecture, planning, and the history of ideas and public policy.
Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit Klemek s account reads like an adventure story.He wears his intercontinental, interdisciplinary scholarship lightly, yet produces profound answers to questions left hanging for sixty years: why, for example, during the Nixon and Reagan eras, local planning agencies felt like haunted houses; how big city building projects got (and get) botched through the agendas of their stakeholders; and why the best metaphor for the urban architect or planner is not the sailor at the helm but the surfer catching the waves.However, for young architects and planners now reappraising the 1960s and 1970s, Klemek offers more than illumination of a downfall and sly prescriptions. The book is an introduction tothe role of social conscience in their careers, suggesting thatthis was not just an old hangup of the 1960s, that therecan be, must be, ways of showingsocial concern in the 2010s andbeyond and methods toavoid thetraps that snared our earlier efforts.
Denise Scott Brown, architect and planner Christopher Klemek has written a remarkably comprehensive and sophisticated account of the rise and fall of what he calls the urban renewal order the great effort to reorder and rebuild cities in the postwar world, based on the triumph of modernist architecture and planning, a self-confident elite of city planners, and huge government programs. It reshaped New York, London, Berlin, and other cities. But it all came crashing down, in different ways in different countries and cities, not least because of the writing and activism of Jane Jacobs, whose influence spread far beyond her New York, where she first confronted and confounded the urban renewal order.
Nathan Glazer, Harvard University Christopher Klemek offers fresh insights into topics of broad interest
above all, the failure of urban renewal programs
and into well-known personalities such as Jane Jacobs and Denise Scott Brown. This book is the first to add international dimensions to its subject, recasting the story of US urban renewal as the end of a transatlantic consensus. A compelling and original book.
Brian Ladd, author of Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age Christopher Klemek has written an erudite transnational history of modernist planning and its discontents. Sweeping from Berlin to Toronto, from London to New York, and from Philadelphia to Boston, Klemek takes intellectual history to the streets. This is a major contribution to the fields of urbanism, architecture, planning, and the history of ideas and public policy.
Thomas J. Sugrue, author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality Klemek's account reads like an adventure story. He wears his intercontinental, interdisciplinary scholarship lightly, yet produces profound answers to questions left hanging for sixty years: why, for example, during the Nixon and Reagan eras, local planning agencies felt like haunted houses; how big city building projects got (and get) botched through the agendas of their stakeholders; and why the best metaphor for the urban architect or planner is not the sailor at the helm but the surfer catching the waves. However, for young architects and planners now reappraising the 1960s and 1970s, Klemek offers more than illumination of a downfall and sly prescriptions. The book is an introduction to the role of social conscience in their careers, suggesting that this was not just 'an old hangup of the 1960s, ' that there can be, must be, ways of showing social concern in the 2010s and beyond
and methods to avoid the traps that snared our earlier efforts.
Denise Scott Brown, architect and planner Christopher Klemek has written a remarkably comprehensive and sophisticated account of the rise and fall of what he calls the urban renewal order
the great effort to reorder and rebuild cities in the postwar world, based on the triumph of modernist architecture and planning, a self-confident elite of city planners, and huge government programs. It reshaped New York, London, Berlin, and other cities. But it all came crashing down, in different ways in different countries and cities, not least because of the writing and activism of Jane Jacobs, whose influence spread far beyond her New York, where she first confronted
and confounded
the urban renewal order.
Nathan Glazer, Harvard University Show Less