Robert Fishman

The American metropolis at century's end: Past and future influences

Abstract The American metropolis at centurys end is vastly different than what many expected just 50 years ago. At mid‐century, seers envisioned a clean, rationally planned city of the future, free of long‐standing problems such as traffic and poverty. The reality is more complex. We built a new metropolis that addressed some major problems while simultaneously creating a host of new ones. The next 50 years will undoubtedly contain similar surprises. In conjunction with the 1999 Annual Housing Conference, which looked at the legacy of the 1949 Housing Act, the Fannie Mae Foundation commissioned a survey that asked urban scholars to rank the key influences shaping the past and future American metropolis. The “top 10” lists that resulted are the focus of this article.

Longer View: The Fifth Migration

Abstract In the 1920s, Lewis Mumford correctly predicted that the rest of the century would be dominated by a “Fourth Migration” from the central cities to their suburbs. In this article I argue that we are now at the beginning of a fifth migration that will reurbanize precisely those inner-city districts that were previously depopulated. I identify four sources for this trend: downtown reurbanism; immigrant reurbanism; Black reurbanism; and White middle-class reurbanism, and point out the challenges involved in planning the fifth migration.

The American planning tradition : culture and policy

The past half-centurys radical transformation of American cities and regions has paradoxically stimulated our interest in older forms of cities and renewed our respect for the planning tradition that created them. Today, with everything urban and public perpetually in crisis, we turn attentively toward the figures who shaped our cities and left a magnificent legacy of public spaces, public transit, public parks, public libraries, public schools, public health, and public safety. The American Planning Tradition reevaluates those planners and their times in a series of essays by some of todays preeminent urbanists. These contributors view such antecedents as Albert Gallatin, Frederick Law Olmsted, Daniel Burnham, Edward Bennett, and Lewis Mumford not merely as precursors who prepared the way for the revelations of modern planning theory, but as contemporaries and even prophets who struggled with many of the same problems that afflict us, and responded with more vision, confidence, and hope than we seem to have today. Their chapters discuss principles proposed for American urban planning, cover a series of national efforts at planning for transportation, resources, and the environment, and describe recent experiences in New Orleans, Portland, Chicago, and Boston. The contributors are Robert Fishman, John Thomas, Michael J. Lacey, James Westcoat, Jr., Alan Brinkley, Margaret Weir, Arnold R. Hirsch, Carl Abbott, Judith A. Martin and Sam Bass Warner, Jr, and Anne Whiston Spirn.

The crowning of the American landscape : eight great spaces and their buildings

The Description for this book, The Crowning of the American Landscape: Eight Great Spaces and Their Buildings, will be forthcoming.