Ed Bacon: Planning Politics, and the Building of Modern Philadelphia by Gregory L. Heller, and: Engineering Philadelphia: The Sellers Family and the Industrial Metropolis by Domenic Vitiello

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Roger D. Simon

Abstract

Urban planning takes many forms. Ed Bacon was a planner by profession, and, as Gregory Heller shows in this sympathetic but balanced biography, Bacon’s ideas and plans have profoundly shaped the direction and landscape of Philadelphia since the mid-twentieth century. The industrialists of the Sellers family were not self-conscious planners in the same sense, but, as Domenic Vitiello persuasively argues in an excellent, multigenerational family biography, through their interventions in the economy, investments in the city’s infrastructure, and civic leadership, they shaped the future city just as much as Bacon.

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Book Reviews