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Gwendolyn Wright Bio
This article explores the ideology behind the contemporary “New Urbanist” movement alongside two key twentieth-century American utopian urban plans for the city of the future, Democracity and Futurama. Both Democracity and Futurama were displays at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and like many contemporary New Urbanist projects, both were totalizing visions—holistic attempts to remake the entire American landscape and in so doing link art and life in the name of democracy. It is the author's argument that many New Urbanist planners suffer from what she calls historical amnesia rooted in a myopic form of nostalgia, since, as she demonstrates in the article, the plans for Democracity and Futurama contain both the closest precursors and the root of many of the problems that proponents of New Urbanism are attempting to rectify. By exploring these two historical models within the context of contemporary urban community building, the author calls for the eradication of historical amnesia in further planning for the city of the future and the development of a new model of American urbanism that appropriates nostalgia for more radical ends and grounds it in the present and its problems.
“This book is concerned essentially with the model of domestic environment in this country, as it has evolved from colonial architecture through current urban projects. Wright shows us the controversies surrounding 13 different kinds of housing at the time each was first adopted and what happened when they were generally accepted. Beginning with Puritan townscape, topics include urban row housing, Big House and slave quarters, factory housing, rural cottages, Victorian suburbs, urban tenements, apartment life, bungalows, company towns, planned residential communities, public housing for the poor, suburban sprawl. All are part of the American dream, all riddled with contradictory messages.” — AIA Journal.
