Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City

$22.50

BACON. Knowles, Scott Gabriel, ed. Imagining Philadelphia: Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City

Univ. of Pennsylvania Press

Pap. 2009

Book ID: 84474

Imagining Philadelphia brings together Bacon's original essay, reprinted here for the first time in fifty years, and a set of original essays on the past, present, and future of urban planning in Philadelphia. In addition to examining Bacon and his motivations for writing the piece, the essays assess the wider context of Philadelphia's planning, architecture, and real estate communities at the time, how city officials were reacting to economic decline, what national precedents shaped Bacon's faith in grand forms of urban renewal, and whether or not it is desirable or even possible to adopt similarly ambitious visions for contemporary urban planning and economic development. The volume closes with a vision of what Philadelphia might look like fifty years from now.

192 pp., 26 illus.