When Philadelphia's iconoclastic city planner Edmund N. Bacon
looked into his crystal ball in 1959, he saw a remarkable vision:
"Philadelphia as an unmatched expression of the vitality of
American technology and culture." In that year Bacon penned an
essay for Greater Philadelphia Magazine, originally
entitled "Philadelphia in the Year 2009," in which he imagined a
city remade, modernized in time to host the 1976 Philadelphia
World's Fair and Bicentennial celebration, an event that would be a
catalyst for a golden age of urban renewal.
What Bacon did not predict was the long, bitter period of economic
decline, population dispersal, and racial confrontation that
Philadelphia was about to enter. As such, his essay comes to us as
a time capsule, a message from one of the city's most influential
and controversial shapers that prompts discussions of what was,
what might have been, and what could yet be in the city's
future.
Imagining Philadelphia brings together Bacon's original
essay, reprinted here for the first time in fifty years, and a set
of original essays on the past, present, and future of urban
planning in Philadelphia. In addition to examining Bacon and his
motivations for writing the piece, the essays assess the wider
context of Philadelphia's planning, architecture, and real estate
communities at the time, how city officials were reacting to
economic decline, what national precedents shaped Bacon's faith in
grand forms of urban renewal, and whether or not it is desirable or
even possible to adopt similarly ambitious visions for contemporary
urban planning and economic development. The volume closes with a
vision of what Philadelphia might look like fifty years from
now.
eISBN: 978-0-8122-0596-1
Subjects: Architecture and Architectural History
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