Planning the Capitalist City: the Colonial Era to the 1920s by Richard E. Foglesong (review)

166 Shorter Book Reviews survey is transferred to the new venue. The book concludes with the victoryof neoclassical form which supplanted the nostalgic vision of a naturalistic urban landscape. The book does not give enough attention to the current of similar thought on urban landscape present in Europe at the time. The nostalgic landscapes of Olmstead were well developed concepts in Britain, but the links are not drawn. Unlike Choay's Planning in the 19th Century and Vance's This Scene of Manthe book does not draw together well the range of thought or economic and social forces creating the urban landscape of the nineteenth century. In the end, those things addressed by the book-planning ideology, individual actions and the peculiarities of street surveys-were greatly overshadowed in their impact on the American urban landscape by the broad social and economic forces of the time. The experiments in street and park layouts came to be curiosities-a minor factor in the generation of the wonderful complexity of the American City. William Code Department of Geography The University of Western Ontario Richard E. Foglesong. Planning the Capitalist City: the Colonial Era to the 1920s. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. x + 286 pp. This study promises to be a'' work of political science, urban history, political economy and planning theory'' (ix). The last is uppermost; so the first chapter lays out the author's theory and the last applies it to what he has discussed in the intervening six chapters. His position is drawn from an analysis of prominent Marxian scholars of the state and of urban land use. Three central contradictions are outlined; property as privately owned and controlled but socially used, the need for capitalists to maintain control but the danger of losing this to democratic socializing proceses, and (appearing only in the last chapter) planners supposedly serving capitalists but possessing some autonomy and potentially being advocates for the common good including working people. In the empirical chapters, Foglesong argues first that "in marked contrast with later periods of urban development, town planning was an essential feature of colonial America" (28). Then, jumping to the nineteenth century, the work of housing reformers, such as Lawrence Veiller and Jacob Riis, is seen as serving capitalist interests, since the proposals never got beyond restrictive building codes. The parks of Frederick Law Olmsted, his son and ShorterBook Reviews 167 otherlandscape architects, are assessed as a step on the road to planning and a diversionfrom urban stress, though largely for upper income people. The City Beautifulwas a venture in planning, but largely at the behest of businessmen. Underthe rubric of' 'roads not taken,'' Foglesong discusses how the solutions of Benjamin Marsh, clearly the most left of the reformers, for controlling congestion were thwarted by powerful speculators. Likewise, Ebenezer Howard's garden cities (though garden suburbs for the affluent were developed)materialize. The company town too, following Pullman's debacle, failedto become a widely followed model. Finally, in the second decade of this century, planning became that of the City Practical (Efficient or Functional) withzoning rather than general plans the chief ingredient. Property interests wouldonly allow planning to serve them and so, in contrast to Europe, the socialgoals of planning were ignored. While this book is a useful overview and analysis, there are some problems. First,many of the conclusions are quite conventional and are often taken from standard works such as Roy Lubove's. The sequence from City Beautiful to CityEfficient is ordinary. Why American planning developed only slowly and thenwithout public housing is explained in the usual way: no strong workingclassparty emerged to press the case. Second, Foglesong does not deliver on the urban history intent; for example, the implementation of parts of Daniel Burnham's 1909 plan is not discussed. The discussion remains in the realm of intellectual history. Interestingly, he totally ignores the great Regional Plan of NewYork of 1929 and a recent Marxian analysis by Robert Fitch. Finally, like otherupper-middle class American Marxists (and probably most Americans), he romanticizes colonial planning, particularly in New England. To conclude that the era was "prior to the emergence of an individualistic land law and conditions for profitable real estate speculation" (233...