KGROUND BOOKS

THE SECOND COMING OF
THE AMERICAN SMALL TOWN
City and town planning is not a profession that many parents would encourage their children to enter. Especially since the disillusionments of the 1960s, the profession has fallen into pop- ular and intellectual disfavor. One recent his- tory, Diane Ghirardo's Building New Commu- nities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy
(Princeton, 1989), even suggests that the inten- tions of New Deal town builders were little dif- ferent from t...