In the 1960s, a new urban ideology emerged in New York. It held that cities thrived through the spontaneous 'ballet of the street', and died when the state erected sterile projects'. This book uses the method of this ideology - walking - to test it in the USA's biggest city, and in its capital.
The 'projects' that are walked in this book range from cultural complexes in Manhattan to New Deal public housing in Brooklyn, Harlem and Queens, from the social experiment of Roosevelt Island to Communist housing co-operatives in the Bronx, from the union-driven rebuilding of the Lower East Side to DC's magnificent Metro.
Each proved that Americans could plan and build a better society, which survives and sometimes thrives today in one of the most unequal places on earth. Finally, Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects asks what a new generation of American socialists might be able to learn from this legacy.
