The American Cities and Technology Reader : Wilderness to Wired City

Cities and Technology, a series of three textbooks and three readers, explores one of the most fundamental changes in the history of human society: the transition from predominantly rural to urban ways of living.

This series presents a new social history of technology, using primarily urban settings as a source of historical evidence and a focus for the interpretation of the historical relations of technology and society.

Drawing on perspectives and writings from across a number of disciplines involved in urban historical studies (archaeology, urban history, historical geography, architectural history and environmental history), the books in this series explore: how towns and cities have been shaped by applications of a range of technologies; the social origins of technology; and how such technological applications have been influenced by their social contexts, including politics, economics, culture and the environment.

The American Cities and Technology Reader is designed to be used on its own or as a companion volume to the American Cities and Technology textbook. Chronologically, this volume ranges from the earliest technological dimensions of Amerindian settlements to the 'wired city' concept of the 1960s and internet communications of the 1990s.

Geographically, its focus is the continental United States, and the majority of the readings selected deal with American cases.

However, the context for the study of modern electronic communications in relation to cities transcends national boundaries just as the technologies themselves do; consequently, the contents of some of the later texts in the volume extend to global coverage.

Among the issues discussed are the rise of the skyscraper, the coming of the automobile age, relations between private and public transport, the development of infrastructural technologies and systems, the implications of electronic communications and the emergence of city planning.

The principal cities featured are New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Karl W. Butzer, David Hornbeck, John W. Reps, Cole Harris, Peirce F. Lewis, Carl W. Condit, William Cronon, John P. McKay, Kenneth T. Jackson