Modern American City Research Articles

Understanding Late Nineteenth-Century American Cities

IDEAS about the character of modern American cities may be traced to origins in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. After mid-century, the crowding of industry and people in the large cities of the Northeast and the Midwest produced a rapid reorganization of the urban landscape that was marked by a concentration of business activities in a downtown core, by a crowding of ethnic neighborhoods around that core, and by an extension of suburbs for middle-income groups far into the countryside along radial lines of public transportation.1 Those developments had definite evolutionary links with previous urban forms, but the recent emergence, the massive scale, and the problems of late nineteenth-century urbanism appeared to be dramatic indicators of a new urban realm. The period was a time when the traditional vocabulary for images of the urban landscape proved increasingly inadequate for dealing with an altered geographical reality. The need to fashion some semblance of order from the apparent chaos of the urban scene led to the formation of a host of new images and ideas about the city in magazine articles, novels, professional journals, guidebooks, local histories, reformist polemics, and various other types of literature that proliferated during that era. In a context that was marked by sharp divisions of class and ethnic origin, those writings sought to address the diverse elements of urban society in an effort to counter the divisive socioeconomic forces that seemed to be on the verge of rending the fabric of American cities.2 Even the most objective landscape descriptions in that charged atmosphere seemed somehow to become laden with cultural meaning. What were believed to be culturally mandated attitudes toward certain key landscape elements-the business district, the tenements, the suburbs, and public transit-came to dominate the efforts to make an intelligible metropolitan landscape. The imagery of the urban landscape found in late nineteenth-century writings comprises a valuable resource to enhance present-day understanding of the initial response to the modern American city. Through a critical reading of a broad range of writing that dealt with the American city and with the city of Boston in particular, it is possible to identify the key elements of that response as they took form in the social, technological, and ideological context

In The Footsteps of Thoreau

HP he pastoral is a state of mind. A stu* dent from New York University or the University of Chicago would probably find the quality of life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, bucolic. Yet for Walter Clark, Jr., an English professor at the University of Michigan who was raised in New England, the university complex with its over 25,000 undergraduates is as urban and anonymous as any sprawling modern American city campus. Clark began to wonder whether his students would ever be able to comprehend in this impersonal environment the pastoral literature of Thoreau, Frost, Hawthorne, and others. Clark decided there had to be a better way and place in which to approach the alien world of the pastoral. After some thought, he settled on a solution and a setting far more conducive to the instruction of his favorite brand of American literature : Why not study the literature of New England in New England? And so, in May of 1975, Clark, his department colleague Alan B. Howes, a cook, a nature instructor, and 20 undergraduates-replete with sleeping bags, backpacks, camping tents, hiking gear, musical instruments, typewriters, writing journals, and an impromptu portable librarypiled into two University of Michigan minibuses and headed for

Urban Popular Music and Interaction: A Semantic Relationship

F or the adolescent and young adult in the modern American city, music, and particularly popular music, constitutes a pervasive and highly valued expressive pattern within the more general array of expressive options offered by our culture. This phenomenon of involvement in popular music warrants ethnographic description and explanation. Popular taste in music is known to vary reliably with social class, race, age, and political orientation (Fox and Williams, 1974; Skipper, 1973; Denisoff and Levine, 1972; Robinson and Hirsch, 1972; Schuessler, 1948), but it is not clear why any specific group chooses a particular type of music as its favored style, especially when the choice lies between such varieties of popular music, as blues or jazz which may have equivalent prestige values within the larger society. The differences in degrees of musical involvement within subcultural groups, particularly those due to factors other than social pressures must also be explained. While the present study is too restricted to provide satisfactory solutions to these problems, we will attempt some exploratory beginnings. We will be concerned here with semantic similarities in the minds of listeners between music and

The Urban Vision: Selected Interpretations of the Modern American City.

This paperbound anthology is one of a series of low-cost books on the social, political, and intellectual history of the United States published under the general editorship of Irvin G. Wyllie of the University of Wisconsin. Judging from the Tager-Goist volume, I would say that all of them were primarily designed for students and are thus to be regarded as texts rather than original contributions of concern to specialists. I do not say this in disparagement: the two editors of The Urban Vision have put together an uncommonly good collection of writings on the American city and have added useful though highly condensed historical introductions to each of the six major sections. These separate introductory passages are further supplemented by a general introduction tracing the rise of the modern industrial city from the mid-19th century to the present. The author of this essay, Professor Tager of the University of Massachusetts, quite rightly makes the point that technology was the crucial factor in this development, but that is the last we hear of the matter in the text except for the article by Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford on the planning of through highways (the first proposal, by the way, for our present interstate highway system). The character of the various selections in the book suggests that the editors belong to the sociological wing of urban historians and analysts, since the emphasis throughout is on sociopolitical reform, planning, social criticism, and analysis rather than on the city as an economic-technical-architectural entity. They chose the selections as representative of the changing attitudes toward the city from the turn of the century on, ranging from the progressive era's hopeful spirit of amelioration by means of reform and planning to the often bitter and pessimistic analyses of the sociological probers who came to prominence after World War II. Many of the writings are drawn from celebrated works that every student of the urban milieu ought to know-Charles Beard's American City Government; Burnham and Bennett's Plan of Chicago; Louis Wirth's Urbanism as a Way of Life; pieces by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, the chief American apostles of the Garden City; Thomas Adam's preface to the Regional Survey of New York; the main conclusions of the Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders; the attacks on planning and urban renewal by Nathan Glazer and Herbert Gans; Jean Gottmann's Megalopolis; and Jane Jacob's Death and Life of Great American Cities.

The Urban Vision: Selected Interpretations of the Modern American City

The Urban Vision: Selected Interpretations of the Modern American City

Urban Engineering in the University

Problems confronting modern American cities demand integrated, interdisciplinary solution procedures, going beyond traditional approaches to urban issues. Current urban problems are both too vast and inordinately complex to be effectively dealt with by independent professionals working in limited and narrowly-defined disciplines. The ASCE Urban Engineering Study Committee has coined the term urban engineering to denote the new multidisciplinary orientation demanded of urban professionals. Universities are particularly important in fostering a more realistic approach to the city. Innovative curricula and interdisciplinary experiments in the real-world laboratory, which are presently underway at Stanford University, are essential media for preparing students to utilize their expertise in concert with professional from other disciplines in dealing with massive urban issues.

The modern American city. By Christopher Tunnard. Anvil Books, Van Nostrand Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey, 1968. 191 pp.

National Civic ReviewVolume 57, Issue 6 p. 336-336 Books in Review The modern American city. By Christopher Tunnard. Anvil Books, Van Nostrand Publishers, Princeton, New Jersey, 1968. 191 pp. First published: June 1968 https://doi.org/10.1002/ncr.4100570616AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume57, Issue6June 1968Pages 336-336 RelatedInformation