Review: Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia, by Gregory L. Heller and Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape, by Elihu Rubin

Abstract

Gregory L. Heller Ed Bacon: Planning, Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013, 320 pp., 25 b/w illus. $39.95 ISBN 9780812244908 Elihu Rubin Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2012, 256 pp., 50 b/w illus. $30.00, ISBN 9780300170184 On 9–10 April 1956, the Harvard Graduate School of Design convened a landmark conference on urban design, the intention of which was “to be exploratory, not didactic, and to try to find a common basis for the joint work of the Architect, the Landscape Architect and the City Planner in the field of Urban Design. In the minds of its sponsors, Urban Design is wider than the scope of these three professions, though all have vital contributions to make.”1 Many argue that this convocation initiated urban design as a discipline distinct from both architecture and planning and that the conference solidified the notion that urban design is a radically interdisciplinary field in which foregrounding public needs takes precedence over issues of beauty and scale. One invitee to that conference was the executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Edmund N. Bacon, whose plangent call for a more humanistic and holistic approach to urban design underscored the need for a new specialization: “Planners have traditionally considered the design of physical structures as detail. Administrators almost invariably think in terms of specific projects and procedures rather than the underlying correlative relationships. What we need is the architect-planner-administrator, and if we ever get it we will then really have an urban designer.”2 Bacon’s prescient plea for comprehensive interpersonal cooperation in the success of urban renewal was consistent with the views of others at the conference, but Bacon remained isolated in the larger context of American postwar urban policy. He had a history of iconoclasm but also of advocating for community participation as a way of supplementing the work of professional planners with input from members of the public.3 He instinctively understood not only that people make cities but also that cities make people. As simple as that formulation may …