Christopher Klemek is assistant professor in the Department of History at the George Washington University.
"An outstanding beginning to tracing the transnational flow of
renewal ideas and recognizing the mimetic quality of urban
policy."-- "Planning Perspectives"
"Klemek's insightful, original, transatlantic perspective on the
fate of what he calls the 'urban renewal order' offers a useful
addition to the growing literature on postwar urbanism."--
"Choice"
"The Transatlantic Collapse of Urban Renewal demonstrates
convincingly how valuable it is to reexamine urban renewal outside
the typical national and single-city context and employing the
international diffusion perspective. . . . Suffice it to say, this
is an important book that would benefit in so many ways courses in
planning history and theory, and should guide future research in
this important planning field."-- "Journal of Planning Education
and Research"
"Christopher Klemek has written a remarkably comprehensive and
sophisticated account of the rise and fall of what he calls the
urban renewal order--the great effort to reorder and rebuild cities
in the postwar world, based on the triumph of modernist
architecture and planning, a self-confident elite of city planners,
and huge government programs. It reshaped New York, London, Berlin,
and other cities. But it all came crashing down, in different ways
in different countries and cities, not least because of the writing
and activism of Jane Jacobs, whose influence spread far beyond her
New York, where she first confronted--and confounded--the urban
renewal order."--Nathan Glazer, Harvard University
"Christopher Klemek has written an erudite transnational history of
modernist planning and its discontents. Sweeping from Berlin to
Toronto, from London to New York, and from Philadelphia to Boston,
Klemek takes intellectual history to the streets. This is a major
contribution to the fields of urbanism, architecture, planning, and
the history of ideas and public policy."--Thomas J. Sugrue, author
of The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar
Detroit
"Christopher Klemek offers fresh insights into topics of broad
interest--above all, the failure of urban renewal programs--and
into well-known personalities such as Jane Jacobs and Denise Scott
Brown. This book is the first to add international dimensions to
its subject, recasting the story of US urban renewal as the end of
a transatlantic consensus. A compelling and original book."--Brian
Ladd, author of Autophobia: Love and Hate in the Automotive Age
"Klemek's account reads like an adventure story. He wears his
intercontinental, interdisciplinary scholarship lightly, yet
produces profound answers to questions left hanging for sixty
years: why, for example, during the Nixon and Reagan eras, local
planning agencies felt like haunted houses; how big city building
projects got (and get) botched through the agendas of their
stakeholders; and why the best metaphor for the urban architect or
planner is not the sailor at the helm but the surfer catching the
waves. However, for young architects and planners now reappraising
the 1960s and 1970s, Klemek offers more than illumination of a
downfall and sly prescriptions. The book is an introduction to the
role of social conscience in their careers, suggesting that this
was not just 'an old hangup of the 1960s, ' that there can be, must
be, ways of showing social concern in the 2010s and beyond--and
methods to avoid the traps that snared our earlier
efforts."--Denise Scott Brown, architect and planner
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