Timing the Future Metropolis—an intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science—explores the network of postwar institutions, formed amid specters of urban "crisis" and "renewal," that set out to envision the future of the American city. Peter Ekman focuses on one decisive node in the network: the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959 by scholars at Harvard and MIT.

Through its sprawling programs of "organized research," its manifold connections to universities, foundations, publishers, and policymakers, and its years of consultation on the planning of a new city in Venezuela—Ciudad Guayana—the Joint Center became preoccupied with the question of how to conceptualize the urban future as an object of knowledge. Timing the Future Metropolis ultimately compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, rethinking how we might imagine cities yet to come—and the consequences of deciding not to.

Peter Ekman teaches the history and theory of landscape and urbanism in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. He is a postdoctoral fellow at USC's Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, and at the Berggruen Institute.

Timing the Future Metropolis is an excellent addition to the intellectual history of urbanism in the U.S. Peter Ekman recounts how urban planning developed as a discipline and its influence on public policy. His research illuminates how urbanist visions constructed in the past are largely unsuitable to twenty-first-century challenges.

Samuel Zipp, Brown University, author of Manhattan Projects and coeditor of Vital Little Plans:

Timing the Future Metropolis is a significant contribution to our understanding of postwar urban, cultural, and intellectual history. Fluidly written, closely observed, exhaustively researched, informed by multiple theoretical traditions, and filled with unique and insightful analyses, it offers a novel perspective on the history of postwar urbanism.

Robert Fishman, University of Michigan, author of Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century:

Centered on the rise and fall from the 1950s through the 1970s of a uniquely ambitious academic institution—the Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies—Peter Ekman's superbly researched analysis becomes a profound reflection on the collapse of mid-twentieth-century hopes to guide the metropolitan future through research-based planning and design. Ekman offers consistently original interpretations of such figures associated with the center as Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Edward Banfield, and Kevin Lynch, as well as the controversies over Urban Renewal and racism that deeply divided the center. Timing the Future Metropolis points us toward a deeper understanding of the still-crucial crisis years for urban theory and for the American city itself.