The “flagship” of new urban streets

New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 9/1/2002

A comprehensive new book on boulevards offers important new findings and is destined to be a classic work on the design of an important and long-neglected street type.

If any street deserves to be built more extensively than has been its fate for the past 70 years, that street is the boulevard. And now research has been completed that lays a compelling basis for the boulevard’s reintroduction throughout North America.

Allan B. Jacobs, a Berkeley professor of city and regional planning known for his 1993 book Great Streets, has teamed up with Elizabeth Macdonald of the University of British Columbia and Yodan Rofé of the Ministry of Construction and Housing in Jerusalem to produce an impressive 257-page volume called The Boulevard Book. Underpriced at $39.95, this extensively illustrated, large-format MIT Press production will prove indispensable to anyone trying to revive the grandest of historical street forms.

In Toronto, Milwaukee, San Francisco, and other cities large and small, boulevards are being planned or built in growing numbers. But resistance from the transportation establishment remains strong.