The Business Monthly
"[H]efty, meticulously researched, richly narrated . . . full of delicious revelations."
Book Description
Taking a closer look at James Rouse, a key figure in urban planning who had a profound influence on American developments, this biography explores the full scope of his life, work, and vision. Better Places, Better Lives details Rouse's transformation from a 22-year-old upstart with an innovative plan to facilitate Baltimore's residential mortgages into a master planner and city builder celebrated on the cover of Time magazine. This biography explores how the migration from city to suburb created a demand for community gathering places and how Rouse met that need by building the first enclosed mall. His vision of planned communities, his conception and creation of the festival marketplace, and his later campaign for affordable housing are examined. Rouse is shown as a leading force in new concepts and building types that affected a wide range of people, from city dwellers and suburbanites to young professionals and tourists. This is a story about the processes, the experiments, and the reactions to setbacks that accompany the act of creating something novel.
About the Author
Joshua Olsen lives in Washington, D.C.
Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse FROM THE PUBLISHER
Taking a closer look at James Rouse, a key figure in urban planning who had a profound influence on American developments, this biography explores the full scope of his life, work, and vision. Better Places, Better Lives details Rouse's transformation from a 22-year-old upstart with an innovative plan to facilitate Baltimore's residential mortgages into a master planner and city builder celebrated on the cover of Time magazine. This biography explores how the migration from city to suburb created a demand for community gathering places and how Rouse met that need by building the first enclosed mall. His vision of planned communities, his conception and creation of the festival marketplace, and his later campaign for affordable housing are examined. Rouse is shown as a leading force in new concepts and building types that affected a wide range of people, from city dwellers and suburbanites to young professionals and tourists. This is a story about the processes, the experiments, and the reactions to setbacks that accompany the act of creating something novel.
Author Biography: Joshua Olsen lives in Washington, D.C.
FROM THE CRITICS
Library Journal
Most people don't know who James Rouse is, but he is well known to architects and planners as one of the most important master planners and real estate developers of the past 50 years. Born in 1914, Rouse worked his way through the Great Depression, earned a bachelor of law degree at night from the University of Maryland, and slowly built up his business experience in mortgage and title guarantees into the mighty Rouse Corporation, one of the largest real estate companies in the world. He was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1981 as the father of urban revitalization. Rouse is most famous for Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston, which opened to wide acclaim in the Bicentennial Year of 1976; Columbia, MD, outside Washington, DC, which is internationally known as one of the largest and most celebrated planned towns; and Harborplace, Baltimore, which spearheaded the revitalization of that great city after 1980. Rouse's life is duly chronicled in this detailed biography by Olsen, who works for a development company near Washington, DC. Extremely thorough, copiously researched, and fully footnoted, this book is a hagiographic masterpiece. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-Peter Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
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