Abstract
Through a brief account of the evolution of city design discourses in the United States, this chapter examines the influence of the everyday and the bottom-up in American city design. It argues that bottom-up, everyday urbanism presents a recurring theme in the discourses of city design in America. Rather than esoteric diversions or frivolous interventions, bottom-up urbanism, as embodied in the non-pedigreed, spatial practices of ordinary citizens has arguably been a constant source of inspiration and innovation for theories and practices in American city design and should be recognized as having a central and defining role in its evolution.
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Notes
- 1.
Talen (2015) makes a similar argument in her work by examining the precedents of DIY urbanism in American history. This chapter builds on similar sources but uses the everyday and bottom-up as a focus for examining the thread that continues to this day. This chapter uses the term ‘city design’ to encompass historical traditions in the design of American cities, and distinguishes it from the discourse of ‘urban design’ that emerged in the 1950s.
- 2.
From the Russell Sage Foundation brochure for the Forest Hills Gardens, New York, one of the early Garden City-inspired projects.
- 3.
For details of this influence and various other historic connections, see Denise Scott Brown’s own account (Scott Brown 2003).
- 4.
From 2000 to 2010, the growth of urban populations in the USA outpaced that of the entire nation (US Census 2012).
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this chapter was written in 2013 for a proposed book Companion to American Urbanism. Although the book did not materialize in the end, the author wishes to thank the editor Joseph Heathcott for the opportunity to conceptualize this piece. He is also grateful to the editors of this book, Conrad Kickert and Mahyar Arefi, for providing a new home for this work, and to the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments and suggestions.
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Hou, J. (2019). Everyday and Bottom-Up: A Counter-Narrative of American City Design. In: Arefi, M., Kickert, C. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Bottom-Up Urbanism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90131-2_2
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