The Internationalization of the City Beautiful

Abstract

While the international dimension of the British garden city movement has been well documented, the global reach of American-style ‘city beautiful’ ideas has been more understated. The reasons lie partly in the ethnocentricity of the dominant American literature. What is generally missing is a broader appreciation of the worldwide move towards civic art at the turn of the twentieth century characterized by a diversity of approaches, exchanges, contestations and cultural expressions. This paper addresses this lacuna. In particular, it draws upon the experiences of Anglophone nations where notions of the city beautiful were shaped by a distinctive cultural mix of indigenous and imported ideas not always directly and unproblematically tied to the American scene.