Book Reviews The Modern Urban Landscape: 1880 to the Present. By Edward C. Relph. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. Pp. 279; illus trations, bibliography, index. $35.00 (cloth); $14.95 (paper). Why do modern cities look as they do? Edward Relph, a University of Toronto geographer, considers this question in a suggestive, beau tifully written study. He focuses on highly visible parts of big cities since the late 19th century—institutional buildings, major thorough fares, and large complexes. Relph identifies four important influences on their patterns, forms, and images: architecture (buildings are the most obvious urban artifacts), urban planning (regulating land use and arrangement), technology, and changing societal circumstance. The urban “patchwork of landscapes” (p. 260), Relph argues, has become increasingly larger, standardized, segregated, artificial, and shared worldwide. This change took place in three stages over the past century. The first, a “transitional” stage during the First Machine Age, ca. 1880s—1930, saw planning institutionalized and incremental additions made to old cities—new skyscraper centers, parkways, and planned suburbs designed in traditional styles. Next came a stage of sweeping changes, ca. 1945—70, created by the Second Machine Age (plastics, computers, chemical agriculture, etc.), that mimicked rather than generated new forms: by corporatization of development that obscured ownership and purpose; by “modernist” architecture that celebrated megastructure, rational order, inflexibility, hardness (no texture or decoration), restricted visual access, ill-defined space; by municipal planning “by the numbers” that standardized regulations, with loss of community involvement and “little concern for the overall look of things” (p. 138); and, above all, by scientific management of government and business bent on erasing the past. Relph sees signs since about 1970 of an emerging third stage of landscape development scattered throughout the urban region. Pluralistic and small scale, it features interest in local history and geography; citizen activism and two new subfields in planning, urban design and community planning; and “post-modernist” architecture promoting eclecticism, quaintness, intimacy, textured facades, stylishness, and pedestrian space. Although Relph sees some hopeful signs, he finds modern cities generally depressing places to look at and live in—the mundane reality of unrealized social ideals of health, justice, equity, democratic gov ernance, security, and beauty as promised by technological wealth and Permission to reprint a book review in this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 456 TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 457 rational, efficient leadership. He clearly prefers citizen-led “townscape ” development but finds ours, since 1930, an “Age of Illusions,” where persistent social problems are obscured, common standards are few, and power brokers’ values dominate. Without fundamental change in the socioeconomic order, constructions of the past fifty years will not soon be undone. The value of this heavily illustrated book lies in the author’s inte grating visible forms with underlying causes to show their cumulative effect on urban landscapes. He borrows freely and perceptively from scholars who have examined individual topics in detail, adding his observations of cities in Great Britain and North America and a few elsewhere. Relph writes with grace and wit (“[Frederick] Taylor was not a relaxed individual” [p. 94]). No one since Lewis Mumford has done a better job of integrating secondary literature and firsthand observations to produce fresh insights about modern city appearances. There are a few shortcomings, but none are serious. Most notably, as the author acknowledges, restricting the study to mostly Englishspeaking cities compromises what can be claimed about urban land scapes worldwide. Nevertheless, Relph is an astute observer. He has written an excellent general book and a solid critique, just the thing for readers who want to know why cities look as they do and how our sometimes flashy yet generally narrow uses of architecture, planning, technology, and cultural circumstance create mean human habitats. John Hancock Dr. Hancock is professor of urban design and planning at the University of Wash ington. He writes on urban and planning history, most recently on New Deal planning in the 1930s. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. By Robert Fishman. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Pp. xii + 241; illustrations, notes, index. $19.95. Historians have followed America’s population from the colonial frontier to grimy industrial cities and on to...
Read full abstract
Aug 16, 2012
David Imbroscio 
Open Access