Cities and Nationhood

Ian Morley's Cities and Nationhood provides a detailed account of the brief period when City Beautiful urban planning came to the Philippines, under the guise of U.S. imperial administration of the country after the Spanish-American War. Morley, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, usefully draws attention to the urban plans made by the architect Daniel Burnham and others, the differences between those plans and prior urban settlement patterns, and the signal contributions to this effort made by William E. Parsons, the American architect in charge of planning and reconstruction for much of the period between 1898 and 1916. The book includes three central empirical chapters: one on Burnham's City Beautiful plan for Manila and how it was realized in practice; one on the planning and development of Baguio, an upland summer capital in the north of the country; and one on plans for regional and provincial capitals. There are a number of worthy insights in these chapters. One is the attention drawn to Parsons's critical role as the chief architect who carried out most of these plans. Another is the realization that American imperial planning did not tear down the older Spanish colonial urban environment. Instead, American planning tended to de-center those environments by erecting new government building precincts in the outskirts or suburbs of older cities. A third insight is the sheer scale of American planning: it touched or transformed approximately twenty of the country's cities

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