Building the Urban Environment

“Building the Urban Environment is entirely original in its overall conceptualization, synthesis of the literature, and its major arguments. Platt demonstrates how post–WWII planning was conducted within a historical context that valorized specific ideas and visions of the city often at the expense of the people who lived in the city. His analytical framework of the organic city is original and significant. It challenges the reader to reconsider the rationales/rationality of modernism as well as the values upon which so much of the received wisdom of the post–WWII planning of cities was predicated.”—Maureen A. Flanagan, Illinois Institute of Technology 
 

“Building the Urban Environment offers many fresh and powerful insights. Platt makes a convincing case that planners were as much a part of the problem as the solution to many urban ills. His synthesis, within the metaphor of the organic city, is highly effective. It frames the entire discussion in a unique way, and provides a cogent means to incorporate nature into the discussion of the city, and to highlight many of the wrong-headed ideas of modernist urban planning. Building the Urban Environment provides a powerful and penetrating critique that touches not only on environmental issues, but race, labor, housing, and municipal administration at both the local and national levels. Through his effective exploration of multi-continent case studies, Platt enriches the argument for the adoption, the failure, and rejection of the organic city.”—Craig E. Colten, Louisiana State University