A New City Beautiful Movement

"Just as the “City Beautiful” movement at the turn of the 20th century transformed America’s ideas of urban design, today’s planners and designers are turning to new models for reclaiming cities and retrofitting suburbs. A century ago, planners tried to lift America’s newly industrialized cities out of their congestion and squalor by infusing them with Beaux Arts architecture and civic planning borrowed from Europe and building parks to provide places of fresh air and sunlight. That movement died with the birth of the automobile age after World War I, when planners reshaped cities to accommodate cars and promoted development of residential areas in the suburbs—thought at the time to be the “healthy” antidote to urban life.

"Today, an urban sustainability movement is inspiring architects and city planners to shape new visions of city life, whether it’s remaking old downtowns and industrial wastelands, incorporating green space, or channeling new growth smartly. Community activists, too, are coming up with new ways of making neighborhoods and cities healthier—ecologically as well as socially. Here are some tools they’re using."

Thanks to Michael Dudley