The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Catherine Bauer Wurster (1905-1964) is an American public housing advocate, educator, and author. As a member of “housers,” a group of urban planners who promoted affordable housing for low income families, Bauer Wurster dramatically altered social housing practice and law in the United States. See Bauer Wurster, Catherine. Modern Housing. Riverside Press. 1934. 

Clarence Stein (1882-1975) is an American urban planner, architect, and author. He is a major proponent of the Garden City Movement in the United States, an urban planning method initiated by Ebenezer Howard.

Daniel Burnham (1846-1912) is an American architect and urban designer associated with the City Beautiful Movement. He was Director of Works for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Dubbed the White City, Burnham’s work for the fair drew on the Neoclassical and Beaux-Arts styles of architecture.  

Sir Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928) is the English founder of the Garden City Movement, an approach to urban planning that promotes the creation of self-contained communities surrounded by greenbelts. See Howard, Ebenezer. To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Swan Sonnenschein & Co. 1898. 

Harry Bulkeley Creswell (1869-1960) is an English architect and author. His ideas about adapting cities to emerging modes of transportation echo those of Jacobs. In the December 1958 issue of British Architectural Review, for instance, he asserts that a city modified for the horse and buggy is unfit for pedestrians.  

Le Corbusier (1887-1965), born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, is a Swiss-French architect and urban planner who spearheaded the modern architectural movement, despite having no formal training as an architect. He is an influential, if polemical, figure, at once praised for his imaginative plans for urban agglomerations and reviled for the soulless monotony of his designs. His brand of modernism encouraged the destruction of the existing urban fabric. Alongside Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier is one of the originators of the celebrated International Style of architecture. 

Robert Moses (1888-1981) is an American urbanist and public official best known for his work in the New York metropolitan area. He is often called the master builder of mid-20th century New York City, Long Island, Westchester County, and Rockland County. He developed plans to build the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which included creating a road through Washington Square Park. Jacobs and other community activists put a stop to this plan. 

Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) is an American scholar who published extensively on architecture and urbanism. The College Art Association awarded Mumford the Frank Jewett Mather Award for architectural criticism in 1963. He was the architectural critic for The New Yorker magazine for over three decades. In 1961, Mumford received the National Book Award for The City in History, which remains essential reading for urban studies scholars.