| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal. By Cathy D. Knepper. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. xviii, 275 pp. $39.95, ISBN 0-8018-6490-9.)

Greenbelt, Maryland, one of three communities built under the New Deal's Resettlement Administration, is a commonly celebrated case of planning ideals translated into a concrete outcome. Texts in planning and urban history cite the building of Greenbelt as a watershed in modern American urban development, focusing largely on its unique physical attributes, which combined elements of the architect Clarence Stein's aborted scheme for Radburn, New Jersey, with Clarence Perry's neighborhood unit plan, both products of 1920s reformers. At the same time, Greenbelt, like Rexford Tugwell's planned community experiments (Greenhills, Ohio, and Greendale, Wisconsin), is frequently dismissed as a nice ideal that failed in implementation. As David R. Goldfield and Blaine A. Brownell note in Urban America: A History (1990), Tugwell's towns ended up as "little more than planned middle-class bedroom suburbs." Cathy D. Knepper's Greenbelt, Maryland, directly challenges that interpretation, noting the important set of relationships between the community's form and its future functioning. In Knepper's well-argued opinion, Greenbelt was an experiment in cooperative community building that strengthened and broadened its cooperative fabric over the next sixty years. . . .

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