Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism

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 universit...