The City is the People by Henry S. Churchill is one of the important postwar publications that criticised modernist town planning, its processes and principles. Henry Stern Churchill (1893–1962) was an architect and city planner best known for his work on urban housing issues. Churchill received his M.A. degree in architecture at the Cornell University in 1916. He was a partner at the Churchill-Fulmer Associates architectural firm based in New York City, and he also acted as a visiting lecturer about housing and planning at Columbia, MIT and Harvard.
The City is the People analyses the history of the modern city. According to the publisher’s marketing info attached to the book, “Mr. Churchill gives a careful analysis of how cities came to be the way they are, and makes some highly concrete suggestions for the future, along with a plea for imagination. His vision points toward a complete redevelopment of urban areas, and his text brilliantly analyzes such a program in all of its facts – political, physical, financial, sociological, economic, and aesthetic. The City is the People shows the way toward intelligent land use and the subsequently created values inherent in comfort health and good living. One would not know whether to value more highly his long and varied experience in the field, or his fresh approach and astringent with which spares neither the potentates of old or some of the planners of today.”
We see our cities, great and small, falling apart, disintegrating. We talk a great deal about replanning them. But if the only changes which our “replanning” can bring about are ones which will leave things the same, there is little use. For one thing, we have never really answered the question, what kind of a city are we planning for?
— Henry S. Churchill in The City is the People, p. 147.
The copy in stock is the 1st edition of the book and an ex-library copy. There is an inscription attached to the free endpaper. According to it, the book has been presented to Finland by the Government of the United States of America, under Public Law 265, 81st Congress, as an expression of the friendship and good will which the people of the united states hold for the people of Finland. The book is in good condition despite its age and history; there are only a few stamps and pencil markings of the library.