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Journal of Planning History
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Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow

A. Joan Saab

University of Rochester

This article explores the ideology behind the contemporary "New Urbanist" movement alongside two key twentieth-century American utopian urban plans for the city of the future, Democracity and Futurama. Both Democracity and Futurama were displays at the 1939 New York World's Fair, and like many contemporary New Urbanist projects, both were totalizing visions—holistic attempts to remake the entire American landscape and in so doing link art and life in the name of democracy. It is the author's argument that many New Urbanist planners suffer from what she calls historical amnesia rooted in a myopic form of nostalgia, since, as she demonstrates in the article, the plans for Democracity and Futurama contain both the closest precursors and the root of many of the problems that proponents of New Urbanism are attempting to rectify. By exploring these two historical models within the context of contemporary urban community building, the author calls for the eradication of historical amnesia in further planning for the city of the future and the development of a new model of American urbanism that appropriates nostalgia for more radical ends and grounds it in the present and its problems.

Key Words: nostalgia • New Urbanism • planning history

Journal of Planning History, Vol. 6, No. 3, 191-213 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1538513206296409
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S. A. Hirt
Premodern, Modern, Postmodern? Placing New Urbanism into a Historical Perspective
Journal of Planning History, August 1, 2009; 8(3): 248 - 273.
[Abstract] [PDF]