The Atlantic Cities and the Landscape + Urbanism blog note the release of this 1959 video as part of the Urban Land Institute‘s 75th anniversary. It seems that everyone is surprised by different things in this video. I’m surprised that the National Association of Home Builders would co-produce anything critical of home building, perhaps especially over 50 years ago. Granted, it was the pattern of home building that was of concern. I’m also surprised at how I think that 1959 was not really that long ago! Tracking the rise and fall of growth worries (aka rampant growth, sprawl) is as easy as tracking recessions over time. The current big slump is likely to make growth controls unpopular for the next decade (?).
Posts Tagged ‘history’
Sprawl Watch More Than 1/2 Century Old
Posted in Design Practice, Landscape Urbanism, tagged cities, city planning, exurban, history, land use planning, sprawl, suburbia, urban planning on January 15, 2012| Leave a Comment »
Olmsted and the American South
Posted in Shoulders of Giants, tagged Civil War, history, landscape architecture, Olmsted on September 29, 2011| 1 Comment »
Frederick Law Olmsted
Frederick Law Olmsted’s endeavors as a Civil War journalist and head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission during the first years of the Civil War have been featured in the NY Times Opinionator/Disunion series twice in the past 3 months. The latest article is in today’s edition, featuring Olmsted’s map of The Cotton Kingdom and the effects of a slave-based economy. An earlier article in July described the broader body of Olmsted’s work over that period of just a few years. Olmsted considered it his greatest contribution to his country. As a Southerner, I cannot help but note this part from today’s article:
For the next several years Olmsted sent back voluminous reports — published in three volumes — of disorder, poverty, inefficiency, backwardness and chaos. We might dismiss these as hopelessly biased Northern observations, yet these accounts gained a wide audience, and challenged the contemporary picture of the cotton south as an economic powerhouse. (emphasis added)
Um, yeah. But who can defend the status quo of the times?
Praxis in Landscape Architecture 