The City Beautiful Movement

Winner of the Lewis Mumford Prize from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History

Winner of the Outstanding Book in Architecture and Urban Planning Award from the Association of American Publishers

Critics of the turn-of-the-century's City Beautiful Movement denounced its projects—broad, tree-lined boulevards and monumental but low-lying civic buildings—as grandiose and unnecessary. In this masterful analysis, William H. Wilson sees the movement as its founders did: as an exercise in participatory politics aimed at changing the way citizens thought about cities.