With its rich narrative and outstanding visual representation of urban form changes, this concise book succeeds in making the reader experience the American city through time and understand the forces behind its evolution. The hypothetical city becomes real through engaging and detailed accounts of events, spaces, and social interactions.
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Professor of Urban Planning, UCLA
American Urban Form—assaying Boston, New York, and Philadelphia—merits acclaim. Imagining our urban past, present, and future, Sam Bass Warner and Andrew Whittemore frame their lively narrative with twenty-first century sensibilities as they plumb the near and more distant past. Assembling chronologically organized big-picture views, the co-authors explain the shaping forces which created assorted urban forms. This superb book, to its credit, features Whittemore's hand-crafted and sumptuously detailed urban landscapes, best thought of as a luminous historical exhibition. A wide range of readers—architects, artists, planners, historians, journalists, lawyers, mayors, legislators, policy makers, and general readers—surely will learn much from this book.
Michael H. Ebner, Lake Forest College
This book represents a fresh approach to a perennial problem—arguably the perennial problem—in urban history. It will surely be, as the authors intend, a very useful and enlightening book for planners and design professionals seeking to learn from a single volume the most important elements of American urban history. The range of detailed, accurate, and insightful knowledge the authors display from the colonial city to the present is simply astonishing. And I believe the book will generate much useful comment and debate among urban historians about how to conceptualize and to present our field.
Robert L. Fishman, Professor of Architecture and Urban Planning, Taubman College, University of Michigan
In this illuminating book, Warner and Whittemore have teamed to produce a richly visual, extraordinarily conceptual view of urbanization in the US.
Choice
…American Urban Form stands out as a concise narration of the various dynamics that shaped the physical form of the American metropolis…The book is highly engaging in its technical descriptions, which are supported by excellent hand drawings by Whittemore.
Garyfalia Palaiologou
The Journal of Space Syntax
CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title, 2012
