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.