Planning the Twentieth-Century American City reassesses the history of planning ideas and the impact of the planning process on specific neighborhoods, regions, and urban communities in the United States since 1900. Focusing on large and small metropolitan areas in all regions of the country, the authors analyze a wide range of planners, issues, and influences to explain how the twentieth-century built environment has developed.

Arguing that planning in practice is far more complicated than historians usually depict, the authors examine closely the everyday social, political, economic, ideological, bureaucratic, and environmental contexts in which planning has occurred. In so doing, they redefine the nature of planning practice, expanding the range of actors and actions that we understand to have shaped urban development. The authors treat a variety of concerns, from parks, civic improvement, housing reform, and social planning to zoning, federal urban policy, public works, and historic preservation.

Contributors are Mary Corbin Sies, Christopher Silver, Jon A. Peterson, Susan Marie Wirka, Eric Sandweiss, Joan E. Draper, John Hancock, Michael H. Lang, Robert E. Ireland, Robert B. Fairbanks, Thomas W. Hanchett, Roger W. Lotchin, Patricia Burgess, Greg Hise, Cliff Ellis, Charles E. Connerly, Robert Hodder, June Manning Thomas, Carl Abbott, Elliott Sclar, and Tony Schuman.