Imagining Philadelphia
Edmund Bacon and the Future of the City

Scott Gabriel Knowles, Editor

184 pages | 6 x 9 | 26 illus.
Paper 2009 | ISBN 978-0-8122-2078-0 | $22.50s | £15.00 | Add to shopping cart

"Imagining Philadelphia offers an insightful exploration of the ideas and impact of the Philadelphia city planner Edmund Bacon, but it is much more. Readers will see that urban development involves personalities beyond one 'great man' and will be challenged to participate themselves in the next set of big ideas to reshape the city."—Charlene Mires, author of Independence Hall in American Memory

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.

Scott Gabriel Knowles teaches history at Drexel University. Listen to an interview with Scott Gabriel Knowles at the Penn Press podcast website.

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