Awarded the Lewis Mumford Prize of The Society for American City and Regional Planning History and named Outstanding Book in Architecture and Urban Planning by the Association of American Publishers.
A major contribution to the scholarship on the history of urban America and the history of American city planning... [Wilson's] discussion of the goals and political reform ideology of the City Beautiful advocates is the most thoughtful and widely researched analysis of this complex subject to haveappeared. --History.
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 did: as an exercise in participatory politics aimed at changing the way citizens thought about cities.
An outstanding piece of scholarship. --Paul Boyer, University of Wisconsin.
