Journal of Urban History

Several innovative transportation concepts were critical components of the early twentieth-century City Beautiful reconfiguration of built environments: orderly public places, suitable for important civic buildings; clear hierarchies of streets, avenues, and boulevards, organized in rational patterns with orchestrated vistas; and new terminals that housed improved intercity rail facilities and enhanced intracity travel through improved multimodal surface transportation connections. The City Beautiful aesthetic approach to conceiving urban circulation networks was an important and often overlooked contribution to transportation planning, and improving urban transportation was an important goal for City Beautiful reformers. A review of historical planning documents and project descriptions suggests that civic leaders’ approaches to improving urban circulation during the City Beautiful era are enduring contributions of the movement’s integrated approach to land use and transportation planning and its desire to transform cities into more beautiful places.

Jena, as a medium-sized city within the German Democratic Republic, confronted the socialist regime’s determination to build a massive skyscraper within the intimate urban core in 1968-1969. Functionally planned as a research facility for the VEB Zeiss, the central government in Berlin also intended the “tower” to symbolize architecturally the victory of socialism in Germany. Townsfolk, who identified collectively, professionally, and individually with the historic town, mobilized as best they could to save as much of their familiar inner city as possible. They could not prevent the construction of the skyscraper, but they did succeed in limiting some of the regime’s other urbanist plans. In the process, they experimented with a variety of oppositional forms that protestors later used in other cities. This article suggests that the existing urban environment symbolically presented an alternative to the socialist revolution and became a rallying point for opponents of the regime.

This article attempts to determine the state of the art in American urban history by looking at 1) the frequency with which books are used in syllabi, 2) the contents of the Journal of Urban History for the last five years, 3) the topics of books awarded prizes by the Urban History Association, and 4) the number of libraries that hold copies of the leading books in the field. The conclusions note a loss of influence by such writers as Mumford, Caro, and Warner, a continuation of the emphasis on narrow, modern time periods, and a general decline in the importance of the field. Comments by Timothy Gilfoyle and Carl Abbott contest the latter conclusion.