Download or read book Dreaming the Rational City written by M. Christine Boyer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dreaming the Rational City is both a history of the city planning profession in the United States and a major polemical statement about the effort to plan and reform the American city. Boyer shows why city planning, which had so much promise at the outset for making cities more liveable, largely failed. She reveals planning's real responsibilities and goals, including the kind of "rational order" that was actually forseen by the planning mentality, and concludes that the planners have continuously served the needs of the dominant capitalist economy.