During the two decades between the founding of Hull House and the 1909Plan of Chicago, the city doubled in population from one to two million,25 withthe majority of newcomers being low-income migrants from Europe and ruralAmerica. While both Jane Addams and Daniel Burnham shared a progressive-minded zeal to “improve” the city of Chicago, their... See more

Moving to a city means that you have the freedom to narrate your own life—as long as you forget that that narrative has been commercialized. To quote Durkheim again: “We are the victims of an illusion which leads us to believe we have ourselves produced what has been imposed upon us externally.”

All of these trends had been decades in the making, but as esteemed urban planner Robert Beauregard notes, it was the summer of unrest that marked a paradigm shift in the minds of the American public. In Voices of Decline , his seminal work, Beauregard traces American perceptions about urban progress and regress in the twentieth century through a... See more