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In the mid-twentieth century, as Americans abandoned city centers in droves to pursue picket-fenced visions of suburbia, architect and urban planner Edmund Bacon turned his sights on shaping urban America. As director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, Bacon forged new approaches to neighborhood development and elevated Philadelphia's image to the level of great world cities. Urban development came with costs, however, and projects that displaced residents and replaced homes with highways did not go uncriticized, nor was every development that Bacon envisioned brought to fruition. Despite these challenges, Bacon oversaw the planning and implementation of dozens of redesigned urban spaces: the restored colonial neighborhood of Society Hill, the new office development of Penn Center, and the transit-oriented shopping center of Market East. Ed Bacon is the first biography of this charismatic but controversial figure. Gregory L. Heller traces the trajectory of Bacon's two-decade tenure as city planning director, which coincided with a transformational period in American planning history. Edmund Bacon is remembered as a larger-than-life personality, but in Heller's detailed account, his successes owed as much to his savvy negotiation of city politics and the pragmatic particulars of his vision. In the present day, as American cities continue to struggle with shrinkage and economic restructuring, Heller's insightful biography reveals an inspiring portrait of determination and a career-long effort to transform planning ideas into reality.
This book attempts to make a comparative analysis of the political process in four middle-sized American cities over the decade 1948-1957. By holding certain factors constant, explanations were sought for policy variations over this time span and in communities of similar size, ranging in population from 50,000 to 70,000. Naming their cities by means of the neutral symbols Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta, the authors embarked upon an extensive program of research involving reading back through the daily newspapers of each city over the ten-year period and conducting extensive interviews, principally among those individuals most likely to be conversant with the city's key issues. An examination of the relationship between policy, the policy process, and general community characteristics provided a focus for the analysis of the data. Running through the gamut of civic activities, the cities' responses were found to vary with respect to urban renewal, park systems, pay scales for city employees, inspection services, and sewage disposal systems. A typology of local political values was applied in terms of four factors: economic growth, provision of life's amenities (that is, comforts as well as necessities), maintenance of traditional services only, and arbitrating among conflicting interests. A framework was thus provided for developing a theory of political decisions at the local level. Four Cities is the result and embodiment of this intensive and highly competent study. Its concluding chapters suggest ways in which community characteristics and institutional arrangements are related to the divergent courses cities take to meet their administrative problems, and the descriptive data throughout the book serve to test various generalizations about local politics made in the literature of political science. Anyone interested in city government—whether as a political scientist, urban sociologist, government researcher, or simply as a taxpayer—will find this book useful and enlightening.