Jason's review
Grand Avenues: The Story of the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. by Scott W. Berg
(My full review of this book is larger than GoodRead's word-count limitations. Find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com:].)
Of all the relatively "modern" topics to develop since the rise of the Industrial Age in the early 1800s, the subject of city planning is one I think particularly fascinating, since by its very nature it seems almost like science-fiction; the attempt to pack millions of humans into a space clearly not designed to naturally hold that many, in a way that's not only safe and physically healthy, but that God forbid might actually produce a couple of benefits as well, things that are simply impossible to replicate in a rural setting. It is a pursuit rooted in real problems that exist in the physical world, but one still deeply associated with pure theory; an industry whose practitioners most often think on a big scale, but almost never get their plans actually implemented past a small realization. It is a topic where cr...more
Of all the relatively "modern" topics to develop since the rise of the Industrial Age in the early 1800s, the subject of city planning is one I think particularly fascinating, since by its very nature it seems almost like science-fiction; the attempt to pack millions of humans into a space clearly not designed to naturally hold that many, in a way that's not only safe and physically healthy, but that God forbid might actually produce a couple of benefits as well, things that are simply impossible to replicate in a rural setting. It is a pursuit rooted in real problems that exist in the physical world, but one still deeply associated with pure theory; an industry whose practitioners most often think on a big scale, but almost never get their plans actually implemented past a small realization. It is a topic where cr...more
