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Full-Text Articles in Architecture
Building Main Street: Village Improvement And The Small Town Ideal, Kirin Makker
Building Main Street: Village Improvement And The Small Town Ideal, Kirin Makker
Open Access Dissertations
Before the American small town was enshrined as an ideal, it was a space of dynamic and pioneering progressive reform, a narrative that has been largely untold in histories of professional planning and landscape history. Archival research shows that village improvement was not simply a prequel to the City Beautiful in the years following the 1893 Chicago Expo, but a rich and complex history that places the residential village at the center of debates about the middle landscape as a civic realm comprised of complimentary and oppositional pastoral and urban worldviews. The second half of the nineteenth century saw an …