Building the Urban Environment: Visions of the Organic City in the United States, Europe and Latin America

This book examines the theoretical evolution of the organic city in different time periods of post-war Europe, the United States and Latin America. The author also contrasts this with the practical experiences of seven case studies.

Looking at the built environment as a material and symbolic place in imaginations, constructed by various actors ranging from grassroots organizations to policymakers, urban planners and private developers, the author takes both a bottom-up and top-down view of the processes, struggles and contestations that shape developments in cities of Brazil, Great Britain, Mexico, the Netherlands and the United States. He thereby examines the globalization of the local particularly in what he terms “the city as a hybrid space”, and sees the nation-state as a critical mediator in between those two scales. The European case studies specifically address struggles of rebuilding economies and cities after the war, the US cases focus mainly on issues related to urban sprawl and deterioration of central neighbourhoods, and the Latin American studies face the additional challenges of high population growth.

The focus on the organic city brings to the forefront the problematic notion of the city as a natural system and the harmful consequences of attributing to the urban environment a life independent of human agency.

Readers might find this book a contribution to bridging theories of urbanism and actual practices. It achieves this by giving voice to various actors, including well-known visionaries and critics like Le Corbusier, Wright, Howard, Buckminster Fuller, Jacobs, Schumacher and Mumford, but also the Mexican students occupying University City, strikers in 1968 in Paris, and residents of Milton Keynes. These were struggling with the failures that systems thinking, technological modernization and environmental preservation discourses in relation to the organic city brought about.

Book note prepared by Julia Wesely