American Urban Form

An illustrated history of the American city's evolution from sparsely populated village to regional metropolis.

American Urban Form—the spaces, places, and boundaries that define city life—has been evolving since the first settlements of colonial days. The changing patterns of houses, buildings, streets, parks, pipes and wires, wharves, railroads, highways, and airports reflect changing patterns of the social, political, and economic processes that shape the city. In this book, Sam Bass Warner and Andrew Whittemore map more than three hundred years of the American city through the evolution of urban form. They do this by offering an illustrated history of “the City”—a hypothetical city (constructed from the histories of Boston, Philadelphia, and New York) that exemplifies the American city's transformation from village to regional metropolis.

In an engaging text accompanied by Whittemore's detailed, meticulous drawings, they chart the City's changes. Planning for the future of cities, they remind us, requires an understanding of the forces that shaped the city's past.

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—Sam Bass Warner, noted urban historian and Visiting Professor of Urban History at MIT, is the author of The Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City and other books.

Andrew H. Whittemore is Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Texas Arlington.

Andrew H. Whittemore is Assistant Professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of Texas Arlington.