Description
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Winner of the 2018 PROSE Award for Architecture & Urban Planning, Association of American Publishers"
"Isenberg, a professor of history at Princeton University, dug deep to capture the transitional years when the city's establishment was on the verge of being altered by cultural forces that it could not control. . . . [
Designing San Francisco] deepens our understanding of how today’s landscape came to be—and the bullets we dodged along the way."
---John King, San Francisco Chronicle"
Designing San Francisco is an outstanding contribution to the growing literature on the City by the Bay, and is indeed one of the finest books in recent memory about American city building in the postwar period."
---Ocean Howell, American Historical Review"The urban historian Alison Isenberg’s
Designing San Francisco is, among its many other virtues, a vital text for helping landscape architects think through this dilemma. . . . Isenberg is a clear and engaging writer who is both transparent and persuasive in presenting her own angle on the story. . . .
Designing San Francisco is a vital critique of the standard narrative of design authorship."
---Justin Parscher, Landscape Architecture Magazine"In
Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay, the historian Alison Isenberg points to a shift around this time in the way San Francisco practiced its urban renewal. Instead of being designed from on high, in the style of Robert Moses in New York, the postwar city grew largely through collaborative planning. This didn’t mean that messy neighborhoods were left alone to find their internal order (as in Jane Jacobs’s preservationist ideal) but that artists, property managers, activists, and others all got involved."
---Nathan Heller, The New Yorker
