Author: Roy Lubove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822974002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 168
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Book Description
Roy Lubove presents the first detailed study of the Regional Planning Association of America, whose organization in 1923 signified a sharp break with traditional housing and planning in the United States. Composed of a small number of talented technicians and social critics, the RPAA was distinctive for its uncompromising criticism of small-scale speculative housing development and planning efforts that failed to relate physical and social change within a regional framework. Lubove's study is based in part upon interviews and materials supplied by some of the founding members of the RPAA.
Author: Patricia Mooney Melvin
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813163919
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240
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Book Description
During the late nineteenth century rapid social and economic changes negated the prevailing conception of the city as a uniform whole. Confronted with this disparity between the old urban definition and the new city of the late nineteenth century, social thinkers searched for a new concept that would correspond more closely to the divided urban community around them. Borrowing an analogy from natural history, these thinkers conceived of the city as an organism composed of interdependent neighborhoods and sought to translate this concept into ways of dealing with the dislocations and problems in urban life. In this new study of American urban history Patricia Melvin traces the growth of the idea of the organic city and the developing emphasis on the neighborhood as the basic urban unit. An early expression of the idea was the settlement house movement, but the most effective application of the idea, Melvin shows, was the social unit organization scheme worked out by Wilbur C. Phillips. As a social planner and organizer, Phillips first tried his approach in New York, then in Milwaukee, and finally in Cincinnati. Although initially successful in dealing with specific issues, Phillips's efforts eventually foundered on friction among ethnic groups and on the opposition of city politicians. Finally, in the 1920s the whole concept of the organic city was supplanted by a new view of the city based not upon a cooperative but upon a competitive model. The Organic City contributes new understanding to an important period of American urban history. Moreover, it shows clearly how important is the role of concepts in shaping the perception of social realities and the attempts to deal with them.
Author: Roy Lubove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 9780822971641
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 206
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Book Description
First published in 1969, Roy Lubove's Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh is a pioneering analysis of elite driven, post-World War II urban renewal in a city once disdained as "hell with the lid off." The book continues to be invaluable to anyone interested in the fate of America's beleaguered metropolitan and industrial centers.
Author: Carolyn S. Loeb
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801866180
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 308
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Book Description
During the 1920s, enterprising realtors, housing professionals, and builders developed the models that became the inspiration for the subdivision tract housing now commonplace in the U.S. Originally published in 2001. Suburban subdivisions of individual family homes are so familiar a part of the American landscape that it is hard to imagine a time when they were not common in the U. S. The shift to large-scale speculative subdivisions is usually attributed to the period after World War II. In Entrepreneurial Vernacular: Developers' Subdivisions in the 1920s, Carolyn S. Loeb shows that the precedents for this change in single-family home design were the result of concerted efforts by entrepreneurial realtors and other housing professionals during the 1920s. In her discussion of the historical and structural forces that propelled this change, Loeb focuses on three typical speculative subdivisions of the 1920s and on the realtors, architects, and building-craftsmen who designed and constructed them. These examples highlight the "shared set of planning and design concerns" that animated realtors (whom Loeb sees as having played the "key role" in this process) and the network of housing experts with whom they associated. Decentralized and loosely coordinated, this network promoted home ownership through flexible strategies of design, planning, financing, and construction which the author describes as a new and "entrepreneurial" vernacular.
Author: Tom Sitton
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520935527
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 385
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Book Description
Los Angeles came of age in the 1920s. The great boom of that decade gave shape to the L.A. of today: its vast suburban sprawl and reliance on the automobile, its prominence as a financial and industrial center, and the rise of Hollywood as the film capital of the world. This collection of original essays explores the making of the Los Angeles metropolis during this remarkable decade. The authors examine the city's racial, political, cultural, and industrial dynamics, making this volume an essential guide to understanding the rise of Los Angeles as one of the most important cities in the world. These essays showcase the work of a new generation of scholars who are turning their attention to the history of the City of Angels to create a richer, more detailed picture of our urban past. The essays provide a fascinating look at life in the new suburbs, in the oil fields, in the movie studios, at church, and at the polling place as they reconceptualize the origins of contemporary urban problems and promise in Los Angeles and beyond. Adding to its interest, the volume is illustrated with period photography, much of which has not been published before.
Author: Kevin Starr
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019507260X
Category : California, Southern
Languages : en
Pages : 494
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Book Description
In Material Dreams, Starr turns to one of the most vibrant decades in the Golden State's history, the 1920s, when some two million Americans migrated to California, the vast majority settling in or around Los Angeles. Although he treats readers to intriguing side trips to Santa Barbara and Pasadena, Starr focuses here mainly on Los Angeles, revealing how this major city arose almost defiantly on a site lacking many of the advantages required for urban development, creating itself out of sheer will, the Great Gatsby of American cities. He describes how William Ellsworth Smyth, the Peter the Hermit of the Irrigation Crusade, propounded the importance of water in Southern California's future, and how such figures as the self-educated, Irish engineer William Mulholland (who built the main aquaducts to Los Angeles) and George Chaffey (who diverted the Colorado River, transforming desert into the lush Imperial Valley) brought life-supporting water to the arid South. He examines the discovery of oil ("Yes it's oil, oil, oil / that makes LA boil," went the official drinking song of the Uplifters Club), the boosters and land developers, the evangelists (such as Bob Shuler, the Methodist Savanarola of Los Angeles, and Aimee Semple McPherson), and countless other colorful figures of the period. There are also fascinating sections on the city's architecture (such as the remarkably innovative Bradbury Building and its eccentric, neophyte designer, George Wyman), the impact of the automobile on city planning, the great antiquarian book collections, the Hollywood film community, and much more. By the end of the decade, Los Angeles had tripled in population and become the fifth largest city in the nation. In Material Dreams, Kevin Starr captures this explosive growth in a narrative tour de force that combines wide-ranging scholarship with captivating prose.
Author: Jon A. Peterson
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801872105
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 484
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Book Description
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Author: Nancy Stieber
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226774176
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 414
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Book Description
Winner of the 1999 Spiro Kostof Book Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. During the early 1900s, Amsterdam developed an international reputation as an urban mecca when invigorating reforms gave rise to new residential neighborhoods encircling the city's dispirited nineteenth-century districts. This new housing, built primarily with government subsidy, not only was affordable but also met rigorous standards of urban planning and architectural design. Nancy Stieber explores the social and political developments that fostered this innovation in public housing. Drawing on government records, professional journals, and polemical writings, Stieber examines how government supported large-scale housing projects, how architects like Berlage redefined their role as architects in service to society, and how the housing occupants were affected by public debates about working-class life, the cultural value of housing, and the role of art in society. Stieber emphasizes the tensions involved in making architectural design a social practice while she demonstrates the success of this collective enterprise in bringing about effective social policy and aesthetic progress.
Author: Roy Lubove
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822975505
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
The Progressives and the Slums chronicles the reform of tenement housing, where some of the worst living conditions in the world existed. Roy Lubove focuses his study on New York City, detailing the methods, accomplishments, and limitations of housing reform at the turn of the twentieth century. The book is based in part on personal interviews with, and the unpublished writings of Lawrence Veiller, the dominant figure in housing reform between 1898 and 1920. Lubove views Veiller's role, surveys developments prior to 1890, and views housing reform within the broader context of progressive-era protest and reform.
Author: Charles E. Connerly
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813935385
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 215
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Book Description
One of Planetizen’s Top Ten Books of 2006 "But for Birmingham," Fred Shuttleworth recalled President John F. Kennedy saying in June 1963 when he invited black leaders to meet with him, "we would not be here today." Birmingham is well known for its civil rights history, particularly for the violent white-on-black bombings that occurred there in the 1960s, resulting in the city’s nickname "Bombingham." What is less well known about Birmingham’s racial history, however, is the extent to which early city planning decisions influenced and prompted the city’s civil rights protests. The first book-length work to analyze this connection, "The Most Segregated City in America": City Planning and Civil Rights in Birmingham, 1920–1980 uncovers the impact of Birmingham’s urban planning decisions on its black communities and reveals how these decisions led directly to the civil rights movement. Spanning over sixty years, Charles E. Connerly’s study begins in the 1920s, when Birmingham used urban planning as an excuse to implement racial zoning laws, pointedly sidestepping the 1917 U.S. Supreme Court Buchanan v. Warley decision that had struck down racial zoning. The result of this obstruction was the South’s longest-standing racial zoning law, which lasted from 1926 to 1951, when it was redeclared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court. Despite the fact that African Americans constituted at least 38 percent of Birmingham’s residents, they faced drastic limitations to their freedom to choose where to live. When in the1940s they rebelled by attempting to purchase homes in off-limit areas, their efforts were labeled as a challenge to city planning, resulting in government and court interventions that became violent. More than fifty bombings ensued between 1947 and 1966, becoming nationally publicized only in 1963, when four black girls were killed in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Connerly effectively uses Birmingham’s history as an example to argue the importance of recognizing the link that exists between city planning and civil rights. His demonstration of how Birmingham’s race-based planning legacy led to the confrontations that culminated in the city’s struggle for civil rights provides a fresh lens on the history and future of urban planning, and its relation to race.
