ABSTRACT
Introduction From the early decades of the 20th century through the 1960s, state planning in the United States of America was able to maintain the integrity of its modernist project. (1) In that project, planners strove to (a) bring reason and democracy to bear on capitalist urbanization, (b) guide state decisionmaking with technical rather than political rationality, (c) produce a coordinated and functional urban form organized around collective goals, and (d) use economic growth to create a middleclass society. Planners took on the challenge of an industrial capitalism forged in the 19th century, and shaped a response to the turmoil of modernization. They did so shrouded in modernism, the "cultural precipitates of this socio-historical period" (Schulte-Sasse, 1987, page 6).
