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In this selection from Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia (1987), urban historian Robert Fishman argues that “the suburban ideal” was, in the final analysis, yet another form of utopia, the utopia of the urban middle class. The ideal was to create a perfect synthesis of urban sophistication and rural virtue. Here was a conception as utopian as that of any visionary social reformer but with an important difference: “Where other modern utopias have been collectivist,” writes Fishman, “suburbia has built its vision of community on the primacy of private property and the individual family.” Fishman describes how America and Europe took different paths towards suburbia. When both the American Frederick Law Olmsted and the French Cesar Daly visited England in the early 1850s, they saw that increasing numbers of the urban middle class were moving out of the central city into suburbs on the urban periphery so as to preserve and protect middle-class domesticity – not just safety and calm surroundings for their families but for the idea of the sanctity of the family as well. Many of these new suburbs were simply clusters of houses built on the outskirts of cities. Others were planned communities. Olmsted returned to America and designed the romantic suburb of Riverside outside of Chicago. Daly returned to Paris where he promoted the idea of building similar suburban places for the French middle class only to be frustrated by “Haussmannization,” the massive rebuilding of Paris carried out by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann. In America, local real estate markets created suburbs for the middle class outside of the cities. In France, national taxes created options for the middle class within the city. As a result, while America chose suburbanity, France chose urbanity.

In the 1920s, Lewis Mumford correctly predicted that the rest of the century would be dominated by a “Fourth Migration” from the central cities to their suburbs. In this article I argue that we are...

Paul Clemens has an important story to tell in this memoir,1 but it is not the story we expect. Born in Detroit in 1973, he grew up as part of a rapidly shrinking minority: white people in the Motor City. We anticipate a literate Eminem, but Clemens is honest enough to admit that his real contacts with the life and culture of black Detroit have been minimal. He had no love for the music the best locus for racial crossovers indeed almost no real contact with black Detroit, because he was educated in the still largely white Catholic parochial system. The real story in this memoir is the story of Clemens's father. He is the one genuinely "made in Detroit," born in 1944 when the city was truly "the arsenal of Democracy," a man who, in his son's words, "worshipped at the altar of the internal combustion engine." His work was making cars, and his only leisure was repairing and racing them. As Clemens observes, his father was part of

The past half-century's radical transformation of American cities and regions has paradoxically stimulated our interest in older forms of cities and renewed our respect for the planning tradition that created them. Today, with everything urban and public perpetually in crisis, we turn attentively toward the figures who shaped our cities and left a magnificent legacy of public spaces, public transit, public parks, public libraries, public schools, public health, and public safety. The American Planning Tradition reevaluates those planners and their times in a series of essays by some of today's preeminent urbanists. These contributors view such antecedents as Albert Gallatin, Frederick Law Olmsted, Daniel Burnham, Edward Bennett, and Lewis Mumford not merely as precursors who prepared the way for the revelations of modern planning theory, but as contemporaries and even prophets who struggled with many of the same problems that afflict us, and responded with more vision, confidence, and hope than we seem to have today. Their chapters discuss principles proposed for American urban planning, cover a series of national efforts at planning for transportation, resources, and the environment, and describe recent experiences in New Orleans, Portland, Chicago, and Boston. The contributors are Robert Fishman, John Thomas, Michael J. Lacey, James Westcoat, Jr., Alan Brinkley, Margaret Weir, Arnold R. Hirsch, Carl Abbott, Judith A. Martin and Sam Bass Warner, Jr, and Anne Whiston Spirn.

ALTHOUGH I BELIEVE THAT MUCH OF THE ANALYSIS IN WILLIAM SHARPE'S and Leonard Wallock's vigorous polemic is seriously mistaken, I strongly agree with one fundamental point: the authors' profound concern for urbanity. They define urbanity as "diversity, cosmopolitanism, political culture, and public life," and they are right to be anxious about the present status and future survival of these crucial values. Unfortunately their anxieties have led them to adopt a literally reactionary analysis that seeks a return to the (supposedly) stirring days of yesteryear, when the clear binary opposition of city and suburb still held true. In the face of disturbing complexities, the authors cling to a vision of a simpler world where cities truly possess urbanity, suburbs do not, and upstanding cultural critics know exactly where they stand. The literary critic Diana Fuss has termed this insistence on preserving traditional dichotomies "policing the binaries." Sharpe and Wallock are particularly anxious to detect scholars who attempt to reconceptualize urban form and, thus (in their view), to subvert the special role of central cities. Not surprisingly, they prefer the critics of the 1950s-1970s who "attacked suburbia for its racial discrimination, patriarchal familism, political separatism, and geographical sprawl." By contrast, they indict more recent scholars (myself included) for "suburbanophilia." Yet the authors themselves acknowledge the truly revolutionary changes in urban and regional form that have transformed what they persist in calling "the suburbs" since 1945. Once bedroom communities-satellites

As Robert Fishman writes of three of urban planning's greatest visionaries, Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, they 'hated the cities of their time with an overwhelming passion. The metropolis was the counter-image of their ideal cities, the hell that inspired their heavens.'