Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism

Peter Ekman

ISBN 10: 1501778382 / ISBN 13: 9781501778384

Published by Cornell University Press, 2024

About this Item

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Seller Inventory # B9781501778384

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication Date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501778382
• ISBN 13: 9781501778384
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 907 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Timing the Future Metropolis―an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science―explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban "crisis" and "renewal," that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT.

Through its sprawling programs of "organized research," its manifold connections to universities, foundations, publishers, and policymakers, and its years of consultation on the planning of a new city in Venezuela―Ciudad Guayana―the Joint Center became preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualize the urban future as an object of knowledge. Timing the Future Metropolis ultimately compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, rethinking how we might imagine cities yet to come―and the consequences of deciding not to.

About the Author

Peter Ekman teaches the history and theory of landscape and urbanism in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. He is a postdoctoral fellow at USC's Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, and at the Berggruen Institute.