Timing the Future Metropolis

Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism

Peter Ekman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781501778384
• eBook ISBN: 9781501778414
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Historical Geography
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Timing the Future Metropolis—an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science—explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban "crisis" and "renewal," that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT.

Through its sprawling programs of "organized research," its manifold connections to universities, foundations, publishers, and policymakers, and its years of consultation on the planning of a new city in Venezuela—Ciudad Guayana—the Joint Center became preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualize the urban future as an object of knowledge. Timing the Future Metropolis ultimately compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, rethinking how we might imagine cities yet to come—and the consequences of deciding not to.

Table of contents

• Introduction: Urban Times
• 1. Centers and Their Edges
• 2. The Atmosphere and the Network
• 3. “Our Retrospection Will All Be to the Future”
• 4. “A Documented Experience”
• 5. Reoriented
• 6. The Belated City
• Coda: A Forward Signal
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index