Unrealized City Plans a Window on a Future That Would Not Be

Blogger Andrew Lynch’s collection of unrealized city plans is a catalog of could-have-beens.

1 minute read

August 5, 2013, 8:00 AM PDT

By Anna Bergren Miller @abergrenmiller


Lynch, who switched from industrial design to urban planning in college, runs the Tumblr Hyperreal Cartography & The Unrealized City. His personal collection of hundreds of maps includes many postwar designs for American cities. “Of course, while a car for every home and a highway through every neighborhood seemed charming at the time, such an idea would make a modern urban planner shudder,” Joe Hanson writes. “One era’s Utopia is another’s hell.”

Lynch’s favorite images, collected on Wired’s "MapLab" blog, include a 1948 San Francisco highway plan, a 1945 design for the expansion of Boston’s subway, and a 1941 plan for the development of the area around the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Thursday, August 1, 2013 in Wired Blogs

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I love the variety of courses, many practical, and all richly illustrated. They have inspired many ideas that I've applied in practice, and in my own teaching. Mary G., Urban Planner

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