Developing Expertise: Architecture and Real Estate in Metropolitan America

摘要

With her new book, Developing Expertise, Sara Stevens has made an important contribution to the historiography of the built environment of the United States. Historians have long been aware of the crucial role real estate developers have played in shaping urban form, and these characters do make frequent appearances in the literature, but there is surprisingly little work focusing on the developers themselves. The studies that do put these figures at the center of the story tend to look at either urban or suburban contexts, but never both. As a result, one can take from the literature the impression that the development of center and periphery must be understood as separate processes. By narrating a history of real estate development as a profession, Stevens demonstrates that the expansion into greenfields and the renewal of the urban core need to be understood as part of a single process. In telling this story, she also offers valuable insights about architectural innovation, the role of publicity, the politics and legal context of development, and-crucially-the evolution of finance. The book is richly illustrated and thoroughly researched, drawing on a broad range of sources, from the popular press to trade journals to personal papers.