Howard Gillette

The Evolution of the Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City

Abstract The history of shopping centers illustrates one of the ways planners have attempted to link physical design to social reform. The leading theorists of the shopping center movement, Victor Gruen and James Rouse, encouraged the creation of controlled environments as exciting as the city but without its usual attendant nuisances. The adaptation of techniques they pioneered in the suburbs has helped revitalize urban retailing downtown, but has raised new questions about the compatibility of urban malls with the needs of the surrounding city.

Assessing James Rouse's Role in American City Planning

Abstract Throughout a long and productive career, developer James Rouse brought a distinctive vision to a variety of planning issues. While his involvement in commercial real estate set him apart from professional planners, he nonetheless drew widely on Garden City and neighborhood planning concepts to pioneer strategies for using physical design to enhance civic life. Alternating his energies between his native Baltimore and the national arena, he greatly influenced trends in modern housing, shopping centers, and philanthropy. Impelled as much by moral as material concerns, his innovations in urban policy mark important trends for the last half of the 20th century. This article examines his role in American city planning.

David M. Scobey, Empire City: The Making and Meaning of the New York City Landscape . Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002. 344 pp.

New York Citys great importance has necessarily attracted exceptional scholarship, including recently a Pulitzer Prize-winning history as well as widely acclaimed studies of the citys physical and social dimensions. Viewed from virtually every angle, the great citys history might appear to have been pretty well exhausted. With the publication of David Scobeys Empire City , however, New York may have received its most innovative and important study to date. Viewing the citys mid-nineteenth century boom as a crucial point in its development, Scobey manages both to infuse familiar subjects with new meaning and to invest them with broad national consequence.

59.50 cloth;

Abstract Owing much of its power to Americas emergence as a power on the world stage, the McMillan Commission plan for Washington, DC, achieved its goal of establishing a monumental core at the heart of the city that could be considered “worthy of the nation.” Its very success, however, signaled the growing distance between capital and city. As strong a cultural representation of national democratic values as the central core remains, it provokes resentment among Washington residents who are denied full political representation in that same government.