American Urban Form

Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2012

American Urban Form—the spaces, places, and boundaries that define city life—has been evolving since the first settlements of colonial days. The changing patterns of houses, buildings, streets, parks, pipes and wires, wharves, railroads, highways, and airports reflect changing patterns of the social, political, and economic processes that shape the city. In this book, Sam Bass Warner and Andrew Whittemore map more than three hundred years of the American city through the evolution of urban form. They do this by offering an illustrated history of “the City”—a hypothetical city (constructed from the histories of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York) that exemplifies the American city’s transformation from village to regional metropolis.

In an engaging text accompanied by Whittemore’s detailed, meticulous drawings, they chart the City’s changes. Planning for the future of cities, they remind us, requires an understanding of the forces that shaped the city’s past.

Sam Bass Warner (d. 2023) was a noted urban historian and Visiting Professor of Urban History at MIT. His many other books include Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870–1900 (Harvard University Press, 1962, rev. 1978) and The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (Harper & Row, 1962; rev. ed. University of California Press, 1995.

Andrew Whittemore is an assistant professor at Depaartment of City and Regional Planning, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.